Imami Shiʿism was a key part of the turbulent thesis and antithesis which formed Islam, and it remains greatly influential today. The aim of the ImBod project is to write the first comprehensive social history of the Imamate.

The article investigates the origins of Indo-European languages in Asia by 65 coupling ancient genomics to archaeology and linguistics.

In this paper, Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga recast new light on the historical tattooing of the “Pintados,” or the the name by which the inhabitants of the Visayas Islands (in the central Philippines) were called by Spanish documenters in the sixteenth century. This is one of their…

Leiden archaeologist José Joordens has been awarded a Veni grant to develop her research on the role of climate change in early hominin evolution.

My ERC Starting Grant, funded with €1.5 million for 5 years as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is focused on building the early warning system WARN-D to reliably forecast depression in young adults before it occurs. Why depression, and why prediction?

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567-1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions.

Early Childhood Community Practitioners’ analyses of new mother’s challenges in Alexandra Township South Africa: a collaboration between academics and practitioners

As a contribution to the changing legislation and evolving societal attitudes concerning environmental issues, this project aims to enhance and manipulate the plants’ own natural defense mechanisms against western flower thrips (WFT).

What can continuity and change in the manufacturing of locally made ceramics from the early colonials Spanish towns of Concepción de la Vega, Cotuí and Nueva Cádiz (1492-1600) tell us about the choices people made in ceramic production as a reaction the the changing social environment?

When do fire making tools appear in prehistory, and how might the use of these tools manifest in the archaeological record?

Neanderthals and modern humans in Belgium, a bone story

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

How might viola and string quartet playing in the performer-centered, moment-to-moment and communicative style heard on early recordings be brought about today?

Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology in Leiden, is to be awarded the ‘Academy Professors Prize’ of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Roebroeks has drastically changed academic thinking about the behaviour of early hominins and our knowledge of the earliest colonisation…

Since the adoption of agriculture people have cultivated fields. The project concerns all kinds of aspects related to raising crops.

Promotor: A.P.IJzerman Co-promotor: A. Bender

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

Central to Nuranisa’s PhD project is the cultural diplomacy practiced by the Javanese courts of central Java (Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Pakualaman and Mangkunegaran) in response to the increasing Dutch colonial power in the 19th and early 20th century. The Javanese sultanates were incorporated into the…

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?

Paul van Enckevort defended his thesis on 3 June 2020.

A dense region of a gaseous and dusty cloud collapses to form a protostar surrounded by a disk and an envelope. This thesis uses both observations and models to study physical and chemical conditions of these protostellar systems which are likely where planets start to form.

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

The HARVEST project explores the dietary choices that our hominin ancestors and relatives made, by recovering information on what they consumed, and how factors like environmental variation, intrinsic biology, and development of food processing technologies could have influenced their decisions.

ASLU 7 - A.E. de Hingh

This study examined the effects of a classroom-focused intervention on different domains of early literacy. The intervention consisted of shared e-book reading combined with a print referencing technique done via a SMART board. The specific goal of the study was to examine whether children could be…

As every year the Faculty of Archaeology bioarchaeology group has visited Schöningen Germany for field research.

Mr. J. Sun defended his thesis on 21 March 2018.

Als gevolg van de grote technologische vooruitgang in de gezondheidszorg worden in toenemende mate gegevens verzameld tijdens de uitvoering van klinische onderzoeken.

In order to gain a better insight into the basis of the rapid jasmonic acid (JA)-mediated stress response, an integrated approach using a targeted high-resolution mass spectrometry-based (HRMS) platform, was conducted to monitor the metabolism of JA using the model system of cell suspension cultures…

How can historically-informed performers step outside the confines of the work-concept?

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

On 20 September 2023 Mark van de Water successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

What does the excavated material tell us about the continuation and/or change of urban life during the transitional phrases from Antiquity to the Middle Ages on Crete and in the eastern Mediterranean more generally?

The idea that modern humans displaced Neanderthals because they were better protected against toxic smoke components is now under fire. An earlier study that put forward this suggestion has now been refuted by genetic research by scientists from Leiden and Wageningen. This new research was published…

An integrated geo-archaeological research of the hominin site Trinil on Java

Can a newly developed, app-based, personalized maintenance program enhance the effectiveness of the exposure-based one-session-treatment for children with a specific phobia?

This special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik (Brill, 2021) brings together articles that explore new digital ways of analyzing and annotating Old English vocabulary.

In a longitudinal study, Eichengreen and colleagues explored how the certain aspects of emotional intelligence impact the development of adolescents’ mental health, thus identifying potential warning signs and targets for intervention programs. Despite a higher risk for mental health issues and lesser…

To what end and how does Plautus constantly underline the Helleni(sti)c provenance of his art? How does this aspect relate the author’s originality?

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).