ABSTRACT
Histories of urban settlement typically focus on conditions of stasis, when continuous habitation in a particular locality enabled the accumulation of physical evidence. In Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was called such idealized conditions are traced to specific periods where urban form is essentially modeled along religious lines. They occur at the two ends of its 'indigenous' history prior to British colonization. European interventions in Asia took the form of metropolitan, secular environments built for commerce. The dynamic traces of smaller kingdoms established in the interregnum between these two points of stasis, which were moved frequently. The biases of successive archeological commissioners have favored the histories of a Theravada 'Sinhala-Buddhist' past, often supporting incipient ethno-nationalist positions much criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Kemper and Jeganathan. In Sri Lanka, 'geographies of mobility' prior to the colonial period are dominated by histories of immigration and religious pilgrimage where religio-cultural differences would shape specific journeys.
