Generations of Leiden students and academics have done archaeological research into the early medieval history of Oegstgeest. This makes this old settlement one of the best-documented sites from that era. In a new book, Leiden researchers take stock.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

Due to the almost complete disappearance of the archive of the Old Dutch West India Company (WIC, 1621-1674) not much is known about the ships and crews of this company. In this project we start the reconstruction of this basic information making use of new digital humanities techniques to extract this…

Essays dedicated to Frans Wiggermann

How did interests outside the scope of the Dutch chartered trading companies influence the career-paths of Dutch colonial governors?

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Archaeobotanic research by prof. dr. C. Bakels and students on agriculture.

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various Dutch cities in the early modern period.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

With the help of the JEDI fund, Fatima al Moufridji and Thijs Porck went in search of cultural contacts between early medieval England, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Together they made four knowledge clips that can now be seen on YouTube.

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

This book explores chronologically, for the first time, the representation and redefinition of Indonesia’s regional cultures through recording media, from the introduction of the gramophone record through the current video compact disc (VCD) era, taking as case study the Minangkabau ethnic group.

This research project is an integral part of its mother-programme NEXUS1492 ERC Synergy Project directed by Prof. Corinne Hofman. Overarchingly, it aims at understanding and bridging from the archaeological perspective the late pre-colonial and early colonial history of the Southeastern Caribbean macroregion…

One of the three long-term research interests of our group concerns the Transformation of the Roman World (c AD 450-900).

The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature

Episode 1: The Golden Horde in a Global Perspective: Imperial Strategies. This project intends to challenge the conventional way of considering the nomadic state organizations and the role of Nomads in world history.

According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, the Caribbean was settled by several successive population dispersals that originated on the American mainland.

The Leiden Ancient History specialization concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors. The appearance of these empires led to the development of an interaction network…

The bottom-up development of post-Roman northwestern Europe

Amerindian settlement patterns and early colonial cartography in Northern Hispaniola

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Update : March 2020 Director: Professor Dr Harco Willems (KU Leuven), co-director Dr Marleen De Meyer (KU Leuven & NVIC)

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.

Kaarle Wirta is one of the four PhDs in Cátia Antunes’ ERC Research Project 'Fighting Monopolies'.

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

This beautifully illustrated volume investigates the social life of objects moving between the Middle East and the West, revealing the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in their trade and reuse.

Leiden University is home to over a hundred specialists studying the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. From 2017-2018 onwards, they will join forces to offer two new options for specialisation within existing MA programmes: Medieval Studies and Early Modern Studies.

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

In this publication the results of the analyses of the Roman harbour of Voorburg-Arentsburg (NL) are presented. This fully inclusive and integrated study of more than 1000 pages is published in two volumes. The publication is written in Dutch, but has got an extensive synthesis/summary in English.

Lecture, Studium Generale

What can we learn from how maritime conflicts were managed in the past? What significance did Maritime Conflict Management have in shaping the standards of diplomacy and international law in pre-modern Atlantic Europe (1200-1600)?

Subproject of

Between 1993 and 2000 the Faculty of Archaeology had a formal cooperation with the Service Régional de l’Archéologie de la Guadeloupe, Direction Regional des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) and the then director André Delpuech. During that period surveys and excavations were carried out at a number of s…

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Hugh Kennedy from SOAS University of London to Leiden. He is the fourth Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.

Situated on the west coast of modern Turkey, the site of Ephesus is one of the largest excavations in Turkey and one of the most visited tourist attractions. Only one tenth of the city has been exposed until now although the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna (ÖAI) has been excavating here…

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

Lecture, LIMS seminar

The story of the iconic Silk Road is often told from the Chinese perspective. An exhibition at Oude UB focuses on the inhabitants and monuments of historical cities in Central Asia, a neglected part of the Silk Road. From 5 September to 17 October.

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

To what extent did the Netherlands grow rich from the Transatlantic slave trade? In his dissertation 'Walcherse Ketens', Gerhard de Kok looks at Vlissingen and Middelburg, the most important slave trade cities in the Netherlands during the second half of the 18th century. It turns out that, although…

On 8 and 9 May 2018 the Workshop 'Challenging the Liberal World Order: The History of the Global South, Decolonization and the United Nations, 1955-2000' takes place at Leiden University.

On 8 June the Faculty of Archaeology and the Department of Antiquity and Cultural Heritage (DACH) of the Palestine Ministry of Tourism and Antiquity signed an agreement in Ramallah on the West Bank. The aim of the agreement is renewed and sustainable co-operation in the field of archaeology.

This research project, that started in September 2008, aims to explore how personal and public memories of the Dutch Revolt in the seventeenth century evolved and interacted to create new political and cultural identities for the societies that eventually were to become the kingdoms of the Netherlands…

In January 2015, during an excavation ahead of a road-building project in the west of the Netherlands, archaeologists from the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden, ARCHOL BV and ADC Archeoprojects recovered an extraordinary set of Bronze Age artefacts.

In the Netherlands, when we talk about the United Nations, the conversation is almost always about the member states from the northern hemisphere. But the most interesting players come from the ‘Global South’, Professor Alanna O'Malley and her team argue in a podcast.