The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Unprecedented initiative in the world, the book compiles the available knowledge on the subject and presents the state-of-the-art in paleoparasitology – term coined about 30 years ago by Brazilian Fiocruz researcher Luiz Fernando Ferreira, pioneer in this science which is concerned with the study of parasites in the past. Multidisciplinary by essence, paleoparasitology gathers contributions from social scientists, biologists, historians, archaeologists, pharmacists, doctors and many other professionals, either in biomedical or humanities fields. With varied applications such as in evolutionary or migration studies, their results often depend on the association between laboratory findings and cultural remains. The book is divided into four parts - Parasites, Hosts, and Human Environment; Parasites Remains Preserved in Various Materials and Techniques in Microscopy and Molecular Diagnostics; Parasite Findings in Archeological Remains: a paleographic view; and Special Studies and Perspectives. Signed by authors from various countries such as Argentina, USA, Germany and France, the book has chapters devoted to the discoveries of paleoparasitology on all continents.

The Archaeology of Colonialism demonstrates how artifacts are not only the residue of social interaction but also instrumental in shaping identities and communities. Claire Lyons and John Papadopoulos summarize the complex issues addressed by this collection of essays. Four case studies illustrate the use of archaeological artifacts to reconstruct social structures. They include ceramic objects from Mesopotamian colonists in fourth-millennium Anatolia; the Greek influence on early Iberian sculpture and language; the influence of architecture on the West African coast; and settlements across Punic Sardinia that indicate the blending of cultures. The remaining essays look at the roles myth, ritual, and religion played in forming colonial identities. In particular, they discuss the cultural middle ground established among Greeks and Etruscans; clothing as an instrument of European colonialism in nineteenth-century Oceania; sixteenth-century Andean urban planning and kinship relations; and the Dutch East India Company settlement at the Cape of Good Hope.