Records publications acquired from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, by the U.S. Library of Congress Offices in New Delhi, India, and Karachi, Pakistan.

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.

For millennia, people of all cultures have decorated the surfaces of their domestic, religious, and public buildings. Earthen architecture in particular has been, and continues to be, a common ground for surface decoration such as paintings, sculpted bas-relief, and ornamental plasterwork. This volume explores the complex issues associated with preserving these surfaces. Case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas are presented. The publication is the result of a colloquium held in 2004 at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, co-organized by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the National Park Service (NPS). The meeting brought together fifty-five conservators, cultural resource managers, materials scientists, engineers, architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, and artists from eleven countries. Divided into four themes--Archaeological Sites, Museum Practice, Historic Buildings, and Living Traditions--the papers examine the conservation of decorated surfaces on earthen architecture within these different contexts.

This volume seeks to answer the question of how the Buddhist monks in today's Sri Lanka—given Buddhism's traditionally nonviolent philosophy—are able to participate in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils.