Middle Paleolithic stone tool technology is one of the major sources of information about Neandertal behavior and adaptations. The Balkan Middle Paleolithic often remains outside of the major debates and interpretations of Neandertal behavior.

The Altai region has yielded a cluster of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stratified sites that have been recently excavated using a multidisciplinary approach.

Band 69 | 2014

Published by the Modderman Stichting / Faculty of Archaeology - Leiden University.

Stratigraphy, Palaeoenvironment and Archaeology of the Middle and Late Pleistocene Deposits.

Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden

The central question of this thesis is: What drives late Middle Paleolithic stone artifact variability? In its attempt to answer this question, this thesis is a contribution to understanding variability within and between late Middle Paleolithic assemblages of the European Plain.

The Middle Paleolithic site of Neumark was first discovered in the 1980’s by German geologist Matthias Thomae.

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of the archaeology of Syria from the end of the Paleolithic period to 300 BC.

The Faculty of Archaeology produces several journals

Corrie Bakels & Hans Kamermans (eds) (2009)

PhD defence

PhD defence

The Wadi al Jizzi Archaeological Project is a systematic and long term archaeological surface survey project, investigating the rich archaeological heritage of the Wadi al Jizzi region (Oman) from the Paleolithic until the early Modern period.

Practical applications for the reconstruction of the past

Les Cottés is one the rare site in western Europe with occupations in sequence by the very last Neandertals and the first anatomically modern humans.

The genetic material of currently living Europeans is partly of Neandertal origin. Were our ancestors successful because they were hybridising and interacting with the local populations they encountered when migrating into new places? Reconstructing our evolutionary trajectory is key for rethinking…

A fragment of a human skull discovered in sediments extracted from the bottom of the North Sea, 15 km off the coast off the Netherlands, has been identified as belonging to the extinct Neandertal group.

The Australian Research Council funded a truly ‘global archaeology’ project comparing the archaeologies of southwest Tasmania and southwest France during the last Ice Age.

During the summer, staff of the Faculty of Archaeology congregate in all parts of the world, initiating or joining fieldwork projects. Read some of their stories here!

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic is a major biological and cultural threshold in the construction of our common humanity. Technological and behavioral changes happened simultaneously to a major climatic cooling, forcing human populations to develop new strategies for the exploitation…

Lecture

Adhesives are an incredibly important part of every day life. They help hold together everything from shoes and mobile phones to satellites in space. But we didn’t invent adhesives: Neanderthals did, to make handles for stone tools over 191,000 years ago. Leiden researchers now found that Neanderthals…

Prehistoric people may well have had an emotional bond with domesticated dogs much earlier than we thought. Leiden PhD candidate and vet Luc Janssens discovered that a dog found at the start of the last century in a grave dating back 14,000 years had been sick for a long time and had been cared for.…

Professor Jan Kolen was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology on September 1, 2018. We sat down with him and interviewed him about his background, the challenges he sees, and the future of our Faculty.

Are predictive archaeological maps a reliable tool to play an important role in the spatial planning? One of the goals of this project was to develop best practices for the production and application of the models.