Shereen Ratnagar, who passed away recently, was known for her research centred on the Harappan civilisation. It is not surprising that she chose to work on the trading encounters between West Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in the third millennium BCE, given her training in Archaeology at Deccan College, Pune and the Institute of Archaeology, London, where she specialised in Mesopotamian archaeology. This became the object of her doctoral research at JNU. The book that emanated from her research (Encounters: The Westerly Trade of the Harappa Civilisation) was not a mere detailing of goods and objects that were moved between the Harappan region and areas to the west such as Mesopotamia, Bahrain and Oman; rather, the book, and particularly its second edition (Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age), provided a nuanced interpretation of these transactions. In an interview on harappa.com, Shereen writes that her focus on the socio-economic and political, in contrast to what other archaeologists at the time in........

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