The Darién region of Panama is the only land bridge connecting North, Central and South America. Nowadays home to descendants of African enslaved peoples, Indigenous peoples (Emberá, Wounaan, and Guna), and mestizos, Darién has been and still is fundamental to connectivity, cultural interchange, and…

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas.

Százhalombatta-Földvar is a Bronze Age fortified tell settlement on the right bank of the river Danube, 30 km south of Budapest in Hungary. It is one of the best preserved temperate climate tells in Europe and well-known for the extraordinarily rich data it produces. Since 2014 Leiden students are welcomed…

A vibrant chronological narrative of ceramic manufacturing practices in the valley of Juigalpa, Chontales, Nicaragua (cal 300 CE - present)

An interdisciplinary study of the Persian Period

Abstract submission is now open for the international conference of the ELS Academy, in Amsterdam on September 1 and 2. For the 2022 International ELS Conference, we invite all involved in legal research using qualitative and/or quantitative methods to submit abstracts, that may focus on ongoing or…

Study Archaeology at Leiden University. Learn about a full range of theoretical, analytical and field methods from some of the world's leading archaeological researchers.

This book is about the archaeology of indigenous peoples who thrived across the Caribbean, the Guianas, and the Lower Amazon basin just before the European invasion, and who also remained central to the early history of conquest and colonization.

How have human-environmental entanglements changed in the Gulf of San Miguel, Darien, Panama, from the first traces human practices through to the present?

Dutch archaeologists are making three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of archaeological objects lost in the Syrian civil war.

Muge Özoglu defended her dissertation on 5 December 2018

Study all aspects of human life in the past and take on a broad, historic perspective.

Study all aspects of cultural heritage from an archaeological prespective.

The Jordan Times has interviewed Peter Akkermans about the damage done to the Early Islamic archaeological site of Khirbet Al Umari, Jordan.

Olivier Nieuwenhuijse, project leader of the project Focus Raqqa, was hosted by the NOS Radio 1 news broadcast on February 16, 2017.

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…

Faculty Lecture

Archaeologist Araceli Rojas has been invited to participate in the award-winning festival Let’s Talk about Water. This festival combines academic seminars, movies, and panel discussions around water issues around the globe.

This book rovides an economic history of Portugal over the course of eight centuries, from 1143 through to 2010 and situates Portugal's economic growth within the context of European development. It also responds to fundamental questions about when, how and why the economy expanded, stagnated or co…

Direct radiocarbon dating of human remains is crucial for the accurate interpretation of prehistory. Yet given the scarcity of prehistoric human remains, direct dating is often too destructive for important fossils. The reduction of sample size necessary for dating bone is therefore of great interest…

The term “Lone Actor” has been applied to a variety of violent individuals who are thought to act out of ideological motivations using terrorist tactics.

From one year to the next, face masks have started to appear in the environment. As the masks are discarded, they end up in the top soil, in sediment layers, and in refuse heaps. In a couple of generations archaeologists will study the layer that has already been labeled the Face Mask Horizon. Current…

In his lectures Aris Politopoulos combines archaeology with video games. He is one of the three nominees for the 2020 LUS Teaching Prize. 'A good teacher is always open to feedback from students.'

A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia

How do you integrate minorities into a society, and what kind of influence does this have on the collective identity? These questions may seem modern, but they have been relevant for a long time. The new Eurasian Empires research group studies how integration and formation of identity took place in…

Elizabeth Hicks won first runner-up in the Netherlands Institute of the Near East (NINO) MA thesis 2021 competition at the end of January.

Commagene in its Local, Regional and Global Hellenistic Context

How did Angkor interact with regional urban centers? How did the settlement system impact the society's agricultural system and regional resilience?

Publication on the excavations at Roman fort Matilo in Leiden

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage

ASLU 28 Michalis Karambinis (2015)

The final conference of the Eurasian Empires programme took place from 15 to 17 June 2016 in Leiden. The conference concluded a five-year research programme in which nine researchers worked on their own specific projects within the programme’s Eurasian scope, transcending borders by bringing together…

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

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

On Friday 5 February 2021 the online conference of the Dutch Platform of Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) took place. This conference served as a platform to bring young, enthusiastic and driven ELS scholars together in a research community and enable them to learn more and discuss about empirical research…

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. Its size and power was revered by some, feared…

Professor of Archaeometry Patrick Degryse analyses archaeological finds using techniques from chemistry, physics and biology. He will give his inaugural lecture on 19 February. He reflects on three interesting propositions from his lecture.

Update : August 2017 Dr Harco Willems

Generally the data from remote sensing surveys - the scanning of the earth by satellite or aircraft in order to obtain information about it - is screened manually in archaeology. However, constant monitoring of the earth's surface causes a huge influx of data of high complexity and high quality. To…

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…