The Netherlands organisation for Scientific Research NWO has granted a subsidy to prof. dr Wilfred H. van Soldt (Humanities, LIAS) and dr Diederik J.W. Meijer (Archaeology, Near East) to conduct a pilot excavation in Iraqi Kurdistan.

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.’

The DNA of young people is regulated to express the right genes at the right time. With the passing of years, the regulation of the DNA gradually gets disrupted, which is an important cause of ageing. A study of over 3,000 people shows that this is not true for everyone: there are people whose DNA appears…

In 2010, the remnants of a 16th century indigenous village were discovered in St. Vincent, on the construction terrain of the new International Argyle Airport.

The precolonial inhabitants of the Caribbean islands communicated, travelled, and exchanged objects and ideas along an expansive inter-island network. New methods of computer modeling shed light on these networks. Emma Slayton is set to discuss her work on this topic at her Defense on the 12th of Se…

Building the neutrino detector KM3NeT on the Mediterranean Sea floor has picked up pace. Five detection lines, each carrying eighteen detectors, have been sunk and installed, and the first measurement data are coming in, says neutrino physicist Dorothea Samtleben.

In September 2025 Leiden University hosted a greatly successful academic conference

Multi-channel sound and video installation of the on-going project: Decomposing Landscape (2014 -).

Four bachelor’s students in archaeology have embarked on a month-long field school in Aruba. They will work with Harold Kelly, a local archaeologist at the National archaeological museum of Aruba, and with the research team of Island(er)s at the Helm.

From July 25th till August 7th, a team led by Professor Marie Soressi went to France and worked at La Grande Roche de Quinçay, a cave site located in a forested area close to the city of Poitiers. The corona outbreak triggered the need to rethink the organisation of the excavation.

Dusted off and fresh from the field, some insight perspectives on the 2012 field season of the Proyecto Arqueologico Centro de Nicaragua. It's safe to summarize the field campaign as having generated some insights, and possible answers, many more contacts, and the occasional frustration for added bo…

NWO-ALW has funded the project Climate impact on human evolution: age calibration of the ICDP Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), led by PIs Cor Langereis and Guillaume Dupont-Nivet (Utrecht University).

The project officially started in September 2020, but with the enrolment of PhD students Hanum Atikasari and Shajeela Shawkat the research team of the ERC project 'Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life' is compl…

culture week fgga. from 25 to 29 May we will pay extra attention to culture. A different theme is central every day.

We are excited to announce the book publication of our alumnus Dr. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay: The Auditory Setting Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts.

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society looks back on a successful research assessment of the institute which took place in the fall of 2018.

The Leiden Ranking is much more than a simple list!

From 12 – 16 May, prof. Fokkens and five RMA students (Kiki de Bondt, Jordy Aal, Mette Langbroek, Gwendolynn de Groote and Bastiaan Steffens) visited Cambridge for a two-day workshop with prof. Marie Louise Sørensen, staff and students of Cambridge University, and a number of the members of the Cambridge…

Om de verkeersveiligheid te kunnen waarborgen en overlast in de binnenstad tegen te gaan, wil de gemeente Enschede als eerste gemeente in Nederland een verbod op fatbikes invoeren. Geerten Boogaard, hoogleraar decentrale overheden, zegt in RTL-nieuws vraagtekens te hebben bij de juridische haalbaarheid…

Nature News reported on the use of bow-and-arrow for hunting based on the research made on small points found in a 54,000-year-old cave site in southern France.

New finds demonstrate that Neandertals were the first in Europe to make standardised and specialised bone tools – which are still in use today. These firndings are reported by Leiden reseachers together with an international team of archaeologists in the PNAS journal (Proceedings National Academy of…

What would happen if there were fewer migrant workers in the Netherlands? Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics, discussed this question on Dutch news site NU.nl.

Originally from Romania, Catalin Popa has been working at our Faculty as a Postdoc for two years now. He is a landscape archaeologist with a deep interest in the role of archaeology in society. “We should also produce a message for non-academics. One that is shaped for people that don’t have the time…

Mike Field has been at the Faculty of Archaeology since 2008. As a driven archaeobotanist, he is consistantly contributing to the study of plant fossils encountered in many faculty as well as external projects. ‘Flexibility, spontaneity, creativity, these are all parts of being an academic.’

The soya sauce in our kitchen cabinets is not a recent acquisition. This sauce is an important element in a long history of exchange between Asia and Europe. This is what Anne Gerritsen claims in her inaugural lecture for the Kikkoman Chair on Friday 12 December.

Tussen de sterren is niet alleen leegte. Er zweven ook stoffen als methanol en koolstofdioxide. Chemische theorieën kunnen nog niet verklaren hoe die zijn ontstaan onder omstandigheden die dat juist onmogelijk zouden moeten maken. Fedor Goumans gaat met een Veni-beurs proberen die vraag te beantwoor…

An international team of astronomers, led by Will Rocha of Leiden Observatory, using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have discovered that the key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds are present in early-stage protostars, where planets have not yet formed.

Huiselijk geweld is een ingrijpend probleem in Nederland, met jaarlijkse fatale gevolgen. De impact gaat verder dan alleen de slachtoffers zelf en raakt ook nabestaanden en de samenleving als geheel. Tot nu toe/Momenteel ontbreekt het echter aan een gestructureerde manier om fatale gevallen systematisch…

All manuscripts submitted to Inter-Section need to adhere to these guidelines. Since 01-08-2022 Inter-Section uses APA7 as a reference system. Inter-Section therefore now follows the new Faculty of Archaeology guidelines concerning referencing and bibliography.

For the following years, Dr Aitor Burguet-Coca will be a returning face at the Faculty of Archaeology. He will join Dr Amanda Henry’s team with his expertise on prehistoric fire use and the methodologies that studying ancient hearths requires.

The Municipality of Oss is a household name in the world of Dutch archaeology. For fifty years, Leiden archaeologists, in collaboration with residents of Oss, have been uncovering the history of the municipality. 2024 is the archaeological year of Oss! In a series of interviews we look back on fifty…

In the spring of 2024 the Faculty of Archaeology welcomed a new postdoc. Dita Auzina, originally from Latvia, works as a researcher in the project of Alex Geurds. ‘I have joined the project as a landscape archaeologist, but I also run my own fieldwork in Nicaragua.’

Several years ago, two amateur archaeologists from Brabant discovered over a hundred Roman coins near to Berlicum in the north of the province. After years of research, it now appears that the location, close to a ford in the river, was a site for offerings. Another interesting fact is that the coins…

At the VIth Monte Albán Round Table conference (July 2011) in Oaxaca, Mexico, Maarten Jansen (Leiden University) together with Mexican archaeologists Dante García and Iván Rivera (both from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) discussed the topography and toponyms of the archaeological…

The start of the renovation of Cluster Zuid was a long time coming, but the moment has finally arrived. On Wednesday 8 June, Dean Mark Rutgers, accompanied by the contractor Constructif, symbolically marked the start of the demolition and reconstruction works by demolishing part of the roof.

Many mosaic stones and potsherds have been excavated, and a Byzantine synagogue is revealing its history layer by layer. The excavations at Horvat Kur are a field school for a young generation of researchers.

Anne Aagten comments on new European plans to deal with migration in podcast on news site nu.nl

From a ruinous building site to a lively university building: that is the drastic metamorphosis that the Wijnhaven complex is going through at this moment. The pictures below already show impressions of the end result.

Dr. Katharine MacDonald (Faculty of Archaeology) sketches the background to a recent paper in Science Advances, co-authored by her and other members of the Liveable Planet team.

As part of our quality control system, we will host the Mid Term Review (2016-2018) on 28 June 2019. In this exercise, our faculty research programmes will be evaluated by an external committee and assessed against the criteria of: scholarly quality, societal relevance and viability.

Prof.dr. Annelou van Gijn has obtained a Marie Curie subsidy for research on wetland activity patterns in Mesolithic Northwest Europe. This funding has been used to employ the researcher dr. Aimée Little. The project will commence in November 2011.

Alexander Geurds, Andrea Waters-Rist, and Laura Van Broekhoven are in the race for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant (Canada).

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) has been pleased to announce Dr. Elizabeth de Lange as a recipient of the 2013 AAPS Fellows Award at the 2013 AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Antonio.

After two years Covid-19, we are happy that the Media Technology staff and students will together again visit the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (Austria). The five-day trip offers a shared source of inspiration and a basis for discussion to students and lecturers.

Work started today on the Kolffpad student complex, with 289 flats for students from Leiden University. Stichtnig DUWO will own the building and the University owns the site at the Bio Science Park. The building should be complete by mid-2023.

Mediterranean archaeologist Dr Anita Casarotto has been awarded a grant of € 5,800 from the Byvanck Fonds for her research on unlocking important data for regional archaeological investigations in the Mediterranean. In collaboration with Leiden University and the KNIR (Royal Netherlands Institute in…

What do you build with when trees are scarce and winters are brutal? For hunter-gatherers living in current-day Ukraine some 18,000 years ago, the answer was simple: mammoth bones.

A recent collaborative paper between researchers from the Theoretical Chemistry & Catalysis and Surface Chemistry groups has been chosen by the renowned Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics journal as a

On the fourth of May, after 16 years, Lia ten Brink is leaving her work as a secretary at LUCAS . She gave up her job, sold her house and will face the adventure of exploring Europe with her husband and two dogs in an old bus...

A marvelous mosaic synagogue floor has been discovered at the Israeli excavation site of Horvat Kur. The timeworn stones of the mosaic clearly form the name ‘El’azar’. Leiden University researcher Jürgen Zangenberg and a group of Leiden students played a role in the excavation. ‘El’azar was likely an…