An enormous number of monumental buildings, such as burial tombs, appeared in Mycenaean Greece after 1600 BC. Why did this urge to build come to an abrupt end 400 years later? Archaeologist Ann Brysbaert investigates the possible causes thanks to her ERC Consolidator Grant.

This PhD project studies immigrant groups in ancient Babylonia and aims at investigating their identities, socioeconomic status, and integration into an ancient multicultural society.

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

Rafał Matuszewski and Kim Beerden, both university lecturers in Ancient History, received a grant from The A.G. Leventis Foundation.

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

The main purpose of DNAmarkerpoint is to better understand the ecology, evolution and biodiversity through the study of ancient- and modern DNA.

The chair group of Ancient and Medieval History at the Radboud University organizes a series of lectures that are held between February and June 2024. The exact dates and titles can be found in the programme below.

Scientific research at the molecular level on a collection of medieval skeletons from Norton Priory in Cheshire, United Kingdom, could help rewrite history after revealing they were affected by an unusual ancient form of the bone disorder, Paget’s disease. Osteoarchaeologist Carla Burrell, attached…

In the world of Ancient Greece the interpretation of supernatural signs was a versatile tool to facilitate decision-making. This is the central hypothesis of the PhD dissertation of historian Kim Beerden. Defence on 14 February.

Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire by Luuk de Ligt and Laurens E. Tacoma (Eds.)

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

Around the sixth and seventh centuries, South and Southeast Asia saw a great religious change: Saivism largely took over from Vaisnavism. We’re going to look at the way in which Saivism, the religion of the god Siva, presented itself with respect to Vaisnavism. In particular we’ll investigate the role…

The precise psychobiological mechanisms leading to chronic physiological stress responses have not been sufficiently explained, although stress is a major risk factor for disease and early death. A problem for conventional stress theory is that most of these responses seem to occur in situations without…

An international team of astronomers, including Leiden PhD student Elia Pizzati, has observed several ancient quasars that, surprisingly, appear to be floating alone in the early universe (less than a billion years after the Big Bang). Until now, astronomers, based on models, assumed that quasars are…

Surveying Indigenous Peoples’ culinary practices prior to the advent of European invasions in the Greater Caribbean

Are traces of fire use detectable in ancient hominin genomes?

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Tab…

In her podcast Tea-Break Time Travel Matilda Siebrecht is joined by fire expert Femke Reidsma, to talk all about how this essential tool was made and used by our ancient human ancestors. How can you recognise an ancient hearth? Why is it so important to study the first use of fire? When was the first…

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

On the 23rd of June Arianna Sacco successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

University Lecturer Bert van Den Berg shares about the recent research by The Greek Philosophical Schools project in Italy. The research sheds new light on the life and death of Plato.

Since the publication of the article in the interdisciplinary journal Nature, over 200 news outlets have showcased the pioneering research.