An archaeologist as a modern-day shaman. An unexpected comparison Professor by Special Appointment of Public Archaeology Luc Amkreutz will make in his inaugural lecture.

Training

Graduation Ceremony

Graduation Ceremony

Professor Joanita Vroom, together with the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) offered the course Byzantine Rome in September 2023. The course, co-taught by Vroom, Letty ten Harkel and various guest lecturers, investigated the transition of the city of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,…

It is late June, and on a windy meadow north of Leiden known as the Vrouw Vennepolder a group of archaeology students just hit the last ice age. Considering this involves manually pushing a ground core to a depth of 10 meters, this is no small feat. Even so, the taking of ground samples in this, at…

Lecture

‘I was very happy and honoured that my thesis was recognised as a valuable contribution to the topic of landscape archaeology.’

Career Event

The past two years, Laura van der Knaap and Professor Karsten Lambers worked on creating open teaching materials on agent-based modeling, funded by Erasmus+ and in collaboration with Danish, Irish and Dutch partners. Programming is an important skill involved in this, which is often seen as intimidating…

Dr Alex Geurds was elected as a Fellow for the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious and old educational charity based in London. Established in 1707, the society aims at the encouragement and advancement of the study and knowledge of the antiquities.

New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 words ago were less traditional than was thought. The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Archol, the National Museum…

In the article “Neanderthals and Us: We’re More Alike Than Once Thought”, we are reminded that many negative traits, from unintelligent to unsophisticated, have long been attributed to Neanderthals in popular culture. However, recent studies bring to light an ever-increasing amount of evidence contradicting…

For the past 2 years, Dr Letty ten Harkel has been jointly running an excavation project of a suspected Roman villa site on the Balearic island of Mallorca with colleagues Dr Antoni Puig Palerm and Ritchie Kolvers, MA. The project was recently awarded a LUF Chastelain-Nobach fund to explore the extend…

PhD defence

Social

Open Day

Open Day

Organisation

Roberto Arciero is part of RESPIRE project (Research Educational and Storytelling Project in Italian Remote Ecosystem), an international and interdisciplinary research team led by Martina Capriotti (University of Camerino) that received the National Geographic Meridian grant. Among the different topics,…

Recently, archaeologist Dr Wei Chu received a grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for an excavation in the Carpathian Mountains. Originally planning for an excavation in Ukraine, his plans were disrupted by the war. ‘We had to change plans really quickly.’

Lecture and Party

Gelderland Heritage and Leiden University’s Faculty of Archaeology have won the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award 2022 in the ‘research’ category with the Heritage Quest citizen science project. ‘Heritage Quest has shown that citizens can play an active role in protecting cultural heritage…

Lecture

The use of fire can tell us a lot about human evolution. Archaeologist Femke Reidsma has developed a more accurate technique to identify how our ancestors used fire. Existing archaeological studies will need to be revised. Reidsma’s study was published in Nature Scientific Reports on 2 November.

Arts and culture

Inaugural lecture

During the Late Pleistocene, Europe was a cold and unforgiving place to live. Even so, groups of early modern humans roamed around, just like their Neanderthal counterparts. It is unclear what kind of dwellings these people inhabited to shelter them against the elements, especially in regions without…

Congress

In summer 2018 classical archaeologist Hanna Stöger passed away. At that moment she was in the midst of several cutting-edge research projects on the use of space in the Roman city of Ostia. To make sure that her groundbreaking work would not go unpublished, long-time colleagues Hans Kamermans and Bouke…

Het zichtbaar maken van ongeschreven verhalen van inheemse culturen en volken van de Cariben. Dat doet de tentoonstelling ‘Caribbean Ties’ in de Oude UB.

In de maanden maart, april en mei organiseerde het programma Transparantie in Informatie, van de ministeries van Economische Zaken en Klimaat (EZK) en Landbouw, Natuur en Voedselkwaliteit (LNV), gesprekken over de veranderopgave naar een Open Departement. De sessies hadden als doel om een eerlijk en…

Archaeologist Jason Laffoon was awarded an NWO Vidi grant for an innovative investigation into ancient migrations in the western Caribbean. The innovative character of this research project lies in the wide-scale application of isotope analysis and isotope mapping. ‘We aim at further developing methods…

Conference

Conference, Public event

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study by archaeologists at Leiden University on the use of fire shows that 400,000 years ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged…