107 Seven Years in Sihagiri Bim An Account of a Sri Lankan-Swedish Collaboration in Settlement Archaeology in Sigiriya 1988 — 1995 Mats Mogren During the course of seven years Sri Lankan and Swedish archaeologists in collaboration built up a core of what is today the Sri Lankan settlement archaeology. Through surveys, excavations and ethnoarchaeological studies an understanding was gradually obtained regarding settlements and subsistence strategies of the Sri Lankan dry zone, from the Mesolithic to the present, and a generation of young Sri Lankan archaeologists got a fair amount of necessary field training. The primary objective was to develop the human resources of Sri Lankan archaeology, but something can also be said about the research results of the project. This article gives a generalised background and, in very brief outline, an overview of the work done, its methodology, constraints and results. Mats Mogren, Department ofArchaeology, Lund University, Sandgatan l, SE-22350 Lund, Sweden. In 1984 Senake Bandaranayake, the renow- ned Sri Lankan archaeologist, known in Sweden for some of his writings (Banda- ranayake 1977, 1985) and a long-time friend of our country, visited some of our archaeo- logical institutes in an attempt to arouse interest in a Sri Lankan-Swedish colla- boration in archaeology. Nothing much came out of it at the time, but at the Southampton WAC in 1986 he met with David Damell, then at the Swedish Central Board of National Antiquities, and plans started forming for a collaboration financed by SAREC (the Swe- dish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries — now part of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Co- operation Agency), and with the Swedish Central Board of National Antiquities and the newly formed Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology (PGIAR) in Colombo as wor- king partners. In 1987 I was asked by Damell if I was interested in setting up a program together with the Sri Lankans. He did not have to ask twice. A reconnaissance trip was undertaken by me in February and March 1988, when the outline of the project was discussed, and during six consecutive field seasons 1988-93 a large amount of work was carried out, which in the last years of the project was developed to publication standard (Bandaranayake & Mogren, Eds. 1994). While SAREC granted the financing and the Central Board of Natio- nal Antiquities provided an administrative framework for the Swedes, the objectives and implementation strategies were decided upon by the PGIAR directorship in collaboration with the main Swedish consultants. Current Swedish Archaeology, Voh 7, l999