The focus of this programme is the inter-community social relationships and transformations of island networks in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide.

Long Island, an islet of Antigua in the northern Lesser Antilles forms the major source for flint in the Lesser Antilles. A survey by Hofman, Hoogland and van Gijn in 1989 has indicated the presence of various raw material sources. Test-excavations at the major flintknapping site of Flinty Bay show…

On the 14th of June, Yliana Rodriquez successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yliana on this achievement!

This dissertation investigates ikat from the eastern Indonesian islands from a uniquely technical perspective, including design analysis of asymmetry and microscopy.

A cultural sequence of western coastal French Guiana from 5000 BP to present

How has landscape and land use changed in these two case studies since independence? What has caused these changes, whether anthropogenic or natural? How do local communities in the areas of study perceive these changes? How can community knowledge be integrated with mapping tools (GIS) to contribute…

On 19 May 2020, Xuechan Ma defended her thesis 'Moving towards Coexistence and Cooperation: The Spratly Islands and International Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. N.J. Schrijver.

What are the capabilities or limitations of traveling between islands and how does this reflect seasonal variation? Is it possible to show higher levels of connectivity between islands based on generated pathways between several sites on two separate islands?

ASLU 28 Michalis Karambinis (2015)

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

How do women and men living in logging concessions in Solomon Islands experience the impacts of logging during and after logging operations? This project assesses how and why industrial logging affects men and women differently. Using insights from an ethnographic case-study of the logging industry…

Concrete Islands in Alphaville A Photo Gallery of Responses to two Seminal Artistic Explorations of Urban Technocracy and its Monstrous Highways

How did local lifeways and crafting practices persist and develop in the diverse environments of the increasingly interconnected Gulf of Fonseca (AD 400-1521)?

The tenth International Conference on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Pacific will be a special edition with a focus on reconciliation. The fatal shooting in 1722 will be remembered, when the Dutch shot and killed ten Easter Islanders. The conference will be held in Leiden from 19 to 24 June.

Yliana Rodríguez was in the middle of a second fieldtrip in the Falklands researching Spanish-English language contact, when global lockdown measures were announced. Sit back, relax and enjoy reading about Yliana's research into a unique speech community.

What is the impact of humans on nature? In Science an article appeared in which researchers try to give an answer to that question. Biogeographer and postdoc at LUCL Sietze Norder is one of its authors.

The Robben Island field school in January and February 2011 investigated and documented the tangible and intangible heritage of Robben Island, encompassing the remains associated with various political prisoners, the Muslim exiles, the lepers and lunatics, the WWII soldiers and Navy personnel, the prison…

The Háskóli Íslands Student Conference on the Medieval North is an interdisciplinary forum for postgraduate students (masters and doctoral level) and early career researchers working in the broad field of medieval northern studies, held every April in Reykjavík, Iceland. Students who have not given…

The precolonial inhabitants of the Caribbean islands communicated, travelled, and exchanged objects and ideas along an expansive inter-island network. New methods of computer modeling shed light on these networks. Emma Slayton is set to discuss her work on this topic at her Defense on the 12th of Se…

Three NGOs are suing the Dutch state for actively contributing to the suffering of refugees on Greek islands. In Dutch newspaper ‘Trouw’, the organisations say that the suffering was caused by the Netherlands agreeing to the EU-Turkey deal.

The number of insect species is plummeting, which is why the University is creating a more biodiverse environment around its buildings. Annetje Ottow, President of the Executive Board, planted the first bee-friendly plants in the front garden of Oude UB on 20 September.

On February 4th standing before his doctoral committee at the Leiden Faculty of Archaeology, St. Kitts-born Cameron Gill, successfully defended and received his Doctorate.

Leiden has one of the most petrified inner-cities of The Netherlands. This is not beneficial for the biodiversity crisis and Leiden University, with a significant number of buildings within the Singels. The priority should be to make a positive impact on the matter.

Biologist Marcel Schaaf is one of four science faculty members who achieved the Senior Teaching Qualification in Leiden last year. How was that and what drives him? ‘Students receive way too often feedback that they cannot put into practice.’

Despite repeated warnings, John Chau visited the remote Indian island of North Sentinel. His goal: to convert the North Sentinelese to Christianity. These islanders, however, aren't in for outsiders and killed the missionary upon his arrival. Anthropologists Erik de Maaker, Tessa Minter and professor…

Dr Brian McGarry, Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, addressed the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in the world's first advisory proceedings concerning climate change. His advocacy for the Commission of Small Island States…

Ustadh Mau Digital Archive project (UMADA) is among the UCLA Library 29 international cultural preservation projects supported by the Modern Endagered Archive Program (Cohort 3). From the 3rd up to the 5th of October, a digitization training workshop took place on Lamu island, on the so-called northern…

What does site patterning reveal about the social landscape dynamics across the historical divide?

In the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) housed its enslaved people on ‘Slave Island’ in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Today ‘Slave Island’ is under serious threat from property developers. Senior lecturer Alicia Schrikker, together with her Sri Lankan colleagues Iromi Perera…

A biographical approach to material cultural interactions between Caribbean communities and Europeans across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800)

Tom Breukel analysed some 250 stone axes from the Caribbean and reconstructed their biographies. This increases our knowledge of production and trade in the period around the arrival of Columbus. PhD defence on 18 April.

Amerindian intra- and inter-insular relationships and social organization in the pre-colonial Windward Islands.

Fieldwork

There is little evidence of the routes connecting Amerindian communities in the Caribbean prior to and just after 1492. Uncovering possible canoe routes between these communities can help to explain the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical links in their social and material networks.…

The central question in this study is: ‘What can the Netherlands learn from the way in which these countries have organized law enforcement and the rule of law in their overseas territories?’

Caribbean archaeological heritage is threatened by natural impacts but also increasingly by economic developments, often resulting from the tourist industry. The continuous construction of specific projects for tourists, accompanied by illegal practices such as looting and sand mining, have major impacts…

Bob van Grieken and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz published an article in the journal Geopolitics which explores the determinants of China's official financing of Pacific Island states.

Through extensive archaeological and documentary research, this study aims to provide a detailed analysis of the maritime cultural landscape of St. Eustatius over the past four centuries. It focuses on bridging the gap between the marine and terrestrial worlds and demonstrates that in order to truly…

Excavations on Saba took place between 1987 and 1992, and then in 2001 and 2002.

People from the Dutch islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius say that violence (mainly verbal) is fairly common in families. This is according to research by Leiden University, the University of Curaçao and UNICEF Netherlands. The researchers make recommendations for preventing such violence over…

The historical archaeology of the Port of Sandy Point and its anchorage, St. Kitts, West Indies

The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology provides an overview of archaeological investigations in the insular Caribbean, understood here as the islands whose shores surround the Caribbean Sea.

The Caribbean before Columbus is a new synthesis of the region’s insular history. It combines the results of the authors’ 55 years of archaeological research on almost every island in the three archipelagoes with that of their numerous colleagues and collaborators.

The research involves the application and combination of archaeological and archaeometrical methodologies. Petrographic analysis and isotopic provenance studies of raw materials and exotics, and the study of the distribution patterns of these materials are used to gain insight into the exchange of goods…

ASLU 13

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

Lecture

Introduction

On the 23d of May, Sanne Rotmeijer successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Sanne on this achievement!