Jelle Wouters (RTC Bhutan), Erik de Maaker (CADS Leiden) and Radhika Gupta (CADS Leiden) have been awarded a €260.000 grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for the research project ‘Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan’. This 4-year research project focuses on vernacular and unacknowledged heritages…

A cultural delegation from Taiwan has presented 175 books and journals to Leiden University. The gift is meant as thanks for all the research carried out by the university on the subject of the indigenous peoples of Formosa, as Taiwan was called in the past.

Publication of Johann Natterer's (1787-1843) word lists of Amazonian languages.

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

Grassroots heritage initiatives and community engagement

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

In the EU brochure 'Creative Europe: rediscovering our cultural heritage' 15 successful heritage projects are presented. Among these projects is NEARCH, in which staff members of the Faculty of Archaeology participated.

A Centre for Global Heritage will be set up at Leiden University, that integrates the unique global breadth and quality of academic expertise at the University and the Leiden Museums with the global infrastructure of practical consultancy expertise built up over the past years by the Centre for International…

An Honours Class about the ostensibly unrecognisable worlds of insular Southeast Asia teaches students a fundamental piece of wisdom:

The project will create a digital platform to document and disseminate the knowledge contained in the Reverse Tonindeye Codex (Nuttall) and its relation with the history of the Iya Nacuaa Teyusi Ñaña “Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Paw” in both Mixtec and Spanish. The codex and the history of this 12th century…

Urban development and lack of appropriate management has been threatening the archaeological site of Tell Balata. In order to save it from further destruction, in 2010 the Tell Balata Archaeological Park project was started.

A far-reaching understanding of human behaviour is necessary to get to grips with conflicts in society and to encourage parties to meet each other halfway. Psychologists, anthropologists and political scientists from Leiden are making invaluable contributions to that understanding. You can find out…

A mere day after setting foot ashore in the Bahamas on October 13th 1492, Christopher Columbus notes the broad foreheads of the inhabitants of the Americas. These permanently altered cranial shapes are deliberately created through the application of pressure to the head of the infant in the first years…

When did the Mali Empire disintegrate? What does the Sunjata heritage demonstrate about the political situation after 1600?

New publication reviews Dutch colonial sources on the Indigenous Brazilian Tapuia people: ‘For them the Dutch were another piece on the political chess board’

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

Drones are proving to be a good means of mapping man-made changes in the landscape. Geophysicist Till Sonneman and his colleagues (archaeology) are experimenting with drones in inaccessible areas of the Caribbean.

War and terrorism overshadow interest in the pre-Islamic heritage of the Arabic peninsula. The new Leiden Centre for the Study of Ancient Arabia aims to make the general public more aware of the ancient history of this region.

Some examples of AI-research done at Leiden.

Two short documentaries by Till F. Sonnemann highlight the work conducted by Leiden archaeologists on Hispaniola as part of the Nexus1492 project.

Meet the people behind the Leiden University Europe Hub.

Escritura de Ñuu Dzaui

Meet the people behind the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) programme.

We deeply cherish our natural and cultural World Heritage, so it seems; when historical monuments and sites are destroyed by war or natural disaster, we are mourning collectively. But what if this World Heritage status is not just a preservation label, but a smokescreen for social and political conflicts…

The aim of this research is the systematic analysis of the wisdom coined by Nahua people of Mexico, based on the historical sources and archaeological evidence, but also in the knowledge developed by contemporary indigenous communities and the contributions of indigenous scholars.

The Social Citizenship and Migration group is formed by a diverse group of researchers from different faculties (Governance and Global Affairs, Law, Humanities, and Social Science) within Leiden University.

Mexico, between 500 B.C. and A.D. 900

Heritage Quest is a large-scale citizen science project in the field of archaeology that allows anyone to contribute to scientific research. It is the first large-scale archaeological citizen science project in The Netherlands and one of the few of its kind in the world. As part of the Cultural Heritage…

The newly opened Culture Arcade exhibition is a place where cultural heritage and video games come together. It is co-organized and curated by the VALUE Foundation of which Faculty staff members Aris Politopoulos and Csilla Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke are part of, together with the Prince Claus Fund.

The Cell Observatory is run by several people some of which have multiple roles. To identify whom to contact for what issue please refer to the list below

Many members of Chicago's P'urhepecha community did not even know they lived a stone’s throw from some of their own historical heritage. Researcher Kate Bellamy organised a meeting to introduce them to books hundreds of years old.

The language learning resource centre unites all language teaching professionals working at Leiden University: teachers and researchers at the LUCL, ATC, LUCAS, LIAS, and ICLON. You can find a list of them, ordered by language and/or role, in the menu on the left.

The MultiGreen project is a collaboration with NWO and CAS. The partners from the Dutch NWO side are the University of Leiden and University Wageningen. The partner from the Chinese CAS is the Institute of Urban Environment and the Institute of Geographic Sciences.

On 11 April 2024, Sophie Starrenburg, Assistant Professor at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, organised a workshop on ‘Climate Change and Cultural Heritage: Moving from Heritage Loss to Reparation’ at Tilburg Law School.

The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organization, collection, and exhibition spaces that meets the breadth of demands placed by today’s “critical visitors.” Fifteen…

LIAS is comprised of three research schools with expertise in different areas:

How and to what extent the historic house (re-)constructs identity through image-making in China.

The LDE Centre for Global Heritage and Development has interviewed Dr Maaike de Waal about the new publication of which she is one of the editors. 'Living (World) Heritage Cities explores how World Heritage Cities are dealing with the preservation of their living heritage, with all the challenges and…

Overview of the Leiden Asia staff per area or country.

How can heritage institutions make their organisations, collections and exhibitions more inclusive and accessible? University lecturer Eliza Steinbock will investigate this using a NWO Smart Culture grant.

Together with four European partner universities heritage specialist Dr Monique van den Dries has been granted an Erasmus+ project (EU-CUL) by the European Commission. This project sets up a unique cooperation between educational scientists and academic heritage specialists. It will study how universities…