Monday, 3 April, the yearly field school for all first-year students at the Faculty of Archaeology will start. The municipality of Oss is welcoming our 120 students and provides an excellent practical learning stage for the basic skills they will need to master for their professional careers.

With Leiden2022 drawing nearer, LeidenGlobal is busy developing extra activities to demonstrate the knowledge that is present in Leiden and to create interaction with a wider audience. With this valorisation, the partnership between several cultural and academic institutions in Leiden matches the theme…

What can Robotics and AI bring to archaeological theory and practice? In return, how can archaeology contribute to the developments in robotics and AI research? Colleagues tackled these questions at an event organised by the Faculty of Archaeology and sponsored by SAILS.

Jasmijn Rana has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship for her research project “The Embodiment of Racialization: Running Muslim Women and the Sense of Non-Belonging”.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded dr. Roy van Beek a Veni grant. This grant offers young researchers the possibility to develop their innovative ideas for a period of three or four years.

Europe is expected to experience a greater frequency of severe floods. Paul Hudson discusses the challenges of flood management The Conversation.

On 19 October 2023, Vincent Delhomme spoke at the conference on ‘European Judicial Narratives’, hosted by the University of Louvain Saint-Louis in Brussels. Vincent participated in the panel devoted to the reception of these judicial narratives in the European legal epistemic community.

Ornately decorated head pieces and jewellery, images of imposing mosques and photos of local people. The 'Splendours of the Silk Roads' exhibition depicts life and different cultures along this important trade route.

On 16 September 2017 the fifth edition of the Night of Arts & Sciences will take place in the city of Leiden. This is your chance to showcase your own work at the festival!

On 27th of October 2021 the Food Citizens? team welcomed dr. Wojciech Goszczyński and dr. Ruta Śpiewak for a day-long seminar at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

The History Days are coming to Leiden for their anniversary edition! The History Days in Leiden on 27, 28 and 29 August 2026 bring together everyone who works with the past professionally: teachers, students, employees of archives, museums and other heritage institutions, independent entrepreneurs,…

Festival, Open House

Lecture, Book Roundtable

Natalia Grincheva (2020). Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-6999-8, 164 pp., £27.99 (paperback).

It was more than two years in the making, but despite the delays, giving up was not an option. In May, eighteen staff members of LUCAS and the Faculty of Archaeology visited NIMAR.

Over 30 ambassadors strengthened their ties with researchers and university leaders in a recent visit to Leiden University. Cross-border collaboration (both literal and figurative) was the theme of presentations and a tour of the Hortus botanicus.

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.

Astronomical observations in Chile, research into native heritage or the treatment of eye diseases in Brazil - Leiden is researching a large number and a wide variety of different topics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Researchers and representatives from 20 countries met on 11 May in Leiden to…

A fragment of a human skull from the collection of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (RMO) and a decorated bison bone, both from the North Sea bed, are rare finds from the end of the last Ice Age. The finds are 13,000 years old and, as such, form the earliest known modern human from the Netherlands…

After months of preparation, the moment of truth had arrived: would the skies above Leiden clear for the promised glitzy planet-and-star show? The people of Leiden turned out in their hundreds to go star-hunting on 25 September. They became more aware than ever of the effects of light pollution.

The material and intellectual presence of Egypt is at the heart of Western culture, religion, and art from Antiquity to the present. In his book ‘Beyond Egyptomania. Objects, style and agency’, archaeologist Miguel John Versluys not only presents the Nachleben of Egypt as a major constituent of (European)…

NWO has awarded a VIDI grant to Alex Geurds for his research proposal entitled Networked practices of contact: Cultural identity at the Late Prehistoric settlement of Aguas Buenas, Nicaragua, AD 500-1522. Geurds will investigate material culture exchange along the frontier of the Mesoamerican and the…

What effect do trends in the art world have on the formation of museum collections? University lecturer Martin Berger wants to answer that question in his research within the Museums, Collections and Society project, which asks ethical questions about the origin of collections.

A thousand-year-old tooth has provided genetic evidence that the so-called

This year, an NWO PhD in the Humanities grant went to Mink van IJzendoorn, enabling him to investigate the disappearance of amphorae. ‘We take means of packaging and shipment for granted, but they are deeply ingrained in our daily lives; they are crucial.’

Classical and Mediterranean archaeologist Tymon de Haas is a relatively recent addition to the Faculty of Archaeology. Succeeding Tesse Stek in September 2018, he has played an important role in teaching since then, working together with colleagues from multiple research groups. ‘I have my corner of…

New publication reviews Dutch colonial sources on the Indigenous Brazilian Tapuia people: ‘For them the Dutch were another piece on the political chess board’

Maarten Jansen, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Archaeology, was appointed as Distinguished Emeritus Professor for two years at the University of Bonn. In this position, Jansen, a world-renowned specialist on ancient Mexican pictorial manuscripts, will further expand upon the long-standing collaboration…

Due to the unrest in the Middle East, many ancient Syrian manuscripts are no longer available or have even been destroyed. Professor of Old Testament Bas ter Haar Romeny received 77 microfilms of Syrian manuscripts, enabling him and his PhD students to research these ‘lost’ manuscripts.

The proposed investigation focuses on the Pre-Hispanic archaeological site Aguas Buenas recently documented by Dr. Alexander Geurds

Call for Papers: Imperial Artefacts. History, Law, and the Looting of Cultural Property

Besides being the author of such a classic work of literature as The Hobbit, Tolkien was also Professor of English Language and Literature in Oxford. How did he incorporate his research in his fiction? An international conference on the subject is being held in Leiden on 18 June.

Since 2017 guest researcher Gerrit de Wit has been working together with Congolese linguists and the Boa community to develop the oral Boa language into a written one. He tells us about 2 unique projects, which are steadily unearthing and describing the structure of a new language.

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 Centre for Digital Scholarship of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities would like to invite you to the symposium on Tools Criticism on Thursday 21 November, from 10.00-18.00. The symposium will be held in the Vossius room of the University Library at Witte…

Radhika Gupta has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council to study how transnational Islamic charitable networks are entangled with Western humanitarianism and neoliberal welfare frameworks.

Peter Akkermans, Professor of Archaeology of the Middle East, cannot say for certain how much damage the destruction by IS has caused in Palmyra.

September 26 is the European Day of Languages. There are 24 official languages in Europe but some 200 languages in total are spoken on our continent. What good are all these different languages? And should we all learn Azerbaijani or Swedish? We asked Lisa Cheng, Professor of General Linguistics.

Often landscape restoration is seen as a quick technical fix, when a long-term and more sensitive approach is necessary. Within her PhD research, conducted over the past five years in South Africa, Ancois de Villiers explored how we can change this approach. ‘A damaged ecosystem can’t be

Quentin Bourgeois, Associate Professor of European Prehistory, will assume the position of Vice-Dean for Education at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University as of 1 February 2026, for a term of four years. Quentin Bourgeois succeeds Alex Geurds, who became Dean of the Faculty on 1 January 2…

What do you get when you combine traditional storytelling, new technology, and a whole lot of creative passion? Sumak Kichwa Wawa, an Andean children's storybook using augmented reality, that's what! Assistant professor, Martine Bruil and researcher Ximena Buller Machado tell us more about this special…

On January 7th Minister van Engelshoven of Education, Culture and Science of The Netherlands announced that the project Island(er)s at the Helm: Co-creating sustainable and inclusive solutions for social adaptation to climate challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean is one of two projects awarded with funding…

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.

By 2050, 70 per cent of the world's population will live in cities. This has major consequences for the lives of city-dwellers and for the environment. Uncontrolled urbanisation calls for an interdisciplinary approach. On 4 September, the first group of students started the new English-language Bachelor's…

Besides being the author of such a classic work of literature as The Hobbit, Tolkien was also Professor of English Language and Literature in Oxford. How did he incorporate his research in his fiction? An international conference on the subject is being held in Leiden on 18 June.

Art historian and professor Kitty Zijlmans is on a mission: she wants to get rid of the notion that the West dominates the art world. To no longer put 'the West and the rest', but the exchange between ideas and cultures at the centre of art history. ‘You will see that there has been so much exchange,…

At the start of the new year, we celebrate the release of a new selection of collection items into the Public Domain. This year, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) is making approximately eight hundred items freely downloadable via Digital Collections.

More than half of the Indonesian population lives in cities. What does this mean for public health? How sustainable are these megacities? This is the subject of the ‘Urban Transitions’ Summer Academy on West Java. This summer course is also the kick-off for a renewed interdisciplinary partnership…

Tenggat waktu pengiriman extended abstract untuk mengikuti BRIN-LDE Academy diperpanjang hingga 14 Agustus 2022.

The Scientific Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SSE-SEG-SAA) convenes once a year a major conference around thematic panels. This year, the annual meeting of the SSE-SEG-SAA addressed the topic of “norms and alternatives”. Prof. dr. Cristina Grasseni and lecturer Janine Prins participated…