Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

It is difficult to imagine a society other than a hierarchical nation-state. This is in part because we neglect alternative forms from the past, argues archaeologist Lewis Borck in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.

Combining cutting-edge quantitative approaches with more traditional book history approaches, this new book offers the first history of medieval manuscript destruction in England from the medieval period to the present.

Cristina Grasseni and Adele Arrigoni Ravasio have co-presented the result of Grasseni’s ethnography with Val Taleggio’s cheesemakers.

On the eve of World War II, Leiden was home to the largest Indonesian student community in the Netherlands. Many of these students joined the resistance against the German occupation, and later some fought for Indonesia’s independence.

The Faculty of Archaeology, in the persons of Marlena Antczak and Lennart Kruijer, had three pictures included in the exhibition 'Heritage on the Move'. The whole collection of 18 pictures can be seen from 3 December 2018 until 7 January 2019 at the Oude UB Building, Rapenburg 70, Leiden.

We are pleased to invite submissions for a conference exploring how heritage and memory practices, alongside the legacies of climate coloniality, shape contemporary understandings and mobilisations of reparations. This event will examine how historical and political dynamics influence reparative justice…

Conference

From Roma standing up for their rights in Ghent, to the comeback of African fashion in Ghana. The documentaries from Visual Ethnography students showcase the beautifully diverse world we live in. On UNESCO Audiovisual Heritage Day, they show why it's so important to document.

On December 3rd, AI4LAM (Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives, and Museums) was launched in London. Leiden University Libraries (UBL)is a founding member, along with more than 40 leading international heritage and knowledge institutions. Together with our partners in AI4LAM, UBL aims to promote…

This study documents and translates the Saa (Zapotec) cultural heritage of the Bene’ Ya’a/En’ne I’ya peoples, the Zapotec inhabitants of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca.

Society has an impact on what is viewed as heritage. Susanna de Beer investigated how heritage can be made enduring by making use of it in the present. Lars de Kruijf, student of Dutch and Journalism New Media, spoke with Susanna de Beer.

This book addresses the definition of history and how people are influenced by it.

This book addresses the definition of history and how people are influenced by it.

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

How has landscape and land use changed in these two case studies since independence? What has caused these changes, whether anthropogenic or natural? How do local communities in the areas of study perceive these changes? How can community knowledge be integrated with mapping tools (GIS) to contribute…

Many members of Chicago's P'urhepecha community did not even know they lived a stone’s throw from some of their own historical heritage. Researcher Kate Bellamy organised a meeting to introduce them to books hundreds of years old.

What do climate change and traditional Japanese music have to do with each other? A great deal, university lecturer Andrea Giolai suspects. He has been awarded an NWO grant to study the relationship in more depth.

When did the Mali Empire disintegrate? What does the Sunjata heritage demonstrate about the political situation after 1600?

UNESCO has recognized an international set of fifteen manuscripts about Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe and the three Hikayat Aceh manuscripts as World Heritage. The manuscripts are inscribed in the global UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This list contains documentary heritage…

How can we monitor and protect biological and cultural diversity in Suriname best? What can we learn from local knowledge and customs associated with biodiversity? How can we understand current species, acoustical, behavioural, and ecological diversity from an evolutionary perspective? Can we predict…

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

The project Deconstructing Stability aims to improve reconstructions of late prehistoric landscapes and predictive models for the purpose of archaeological heritage management.

A technique originally developed for satellite imaging can now be used to recover pictographic texts from underneath the surface of a five hundred year old Mexican manuscript.

The Van Loon project sets out to safeguard the archives of Dutch archaeologist Maurits van Loon (Amsterdam, September 22, 1923 - Montpellier, October 12, 2006) and make them accessible for further study.

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

Considering Mesoamerican Precolonial books as material objects

Houses, warehouses, wells, a mooring and even a stable. All of this can be seen on the oldest known map of the island of Dejima acquired by Leiden University Libraries (UBL). The map provides a highly detailed picture of a tiny living environment on the isolated island.

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

Conference

Festschrift for Prof. Dr Raymond H.A. Corbey in celebration of his 70th birthday

This project explores themes at the intersection of maritime history and environmental history by looking at the problems Dutch ships encountered in the different climates of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and the solutions they could provide.

This project investigates the professionalisation of university libraries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the lens of the medieval manuscript holdings. Taking Leiden University Library as a starting point, it sheds light on the changing practices surrounding the conservation,…

The Leiden Archaeology Social Media Team (LUFASM) proudly presents their second mini-documentary in the series on Leiden Archaeology projects. The Karakorum Rescue Project is run by Marike van Aerde and Abdul Ghani Khan, and is a collaboration between archaeologists in Pakistan and the Netherlands.

Sometimes fascination can lead to in-depth research. Such is the case with Wahyu Widodo, who came across the Islamic Walikutuban ritual in Java in 2019, on which he subsequently wrote his PhD dissertation. Widodo: ‘Besides community, it also breeds political loyalty’

Dr Maikel Kuijpers, a staff member at the Faculty of Archaeology and a guest researcher at the Centre for Environmental Sciences (CML), is participating in an exploratory interdisciplinary study on the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Made possible by a Seed Fund of the Leiden University Global…

The theme of the Heritage Open Days Leiden on 10 and 11 September is sustainability. At four University locations guides will talk about the history of the buildings and how they have been renovated. And there is a first: tours in sign language.

The aim of ANCIENT CHARM was to develop neutron-imaging techniques and the associated equipment, and help establish neutron imaging as a mainstream archaeological analytical technique. In particular, one of the goals was a new imaging technique which called neutron resonant capture imaging combined…

Last month (February 5-8 2024), the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, hosted a workshop entitled ‘Caribbean World Heritage Sites in the light of today’s global challenges: the case of Historic Bridgetown and Its Garrison’.

Over the past year, historian Fenna IJtsma delved into 'four centuries of historical greenery'. As part of the Heritage Deal, with input from biologists at Naturalis and others, she looked for inspiration and examples from the past to contribute to a future climate-proof city centre.