Archaeological and Anthropological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the interaction of aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions.

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

How can we make the information in handwritten historical research reports accessible and searchable? Data scientists at Leiden University are working with other universities on a method that will improve access to cultural heritage.

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

The oil pipeline in Dakota, the widening of the motorway near Stonehenge, the construction of dams in Turkey and Iraq: newspapers and social media are full of alarming articles about threats to heritage as a result of large-scale construction work. Heritage experts at Leiden University have developed…

Clustered Neighbourhood Settlements of the Central Anatolian Neolithic ca. 8500-5500 Cal. BC

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

On 3 September 2025, more than 30 archaeological objects were returned to Peru, Panama and Costa Rica. The objects come from a private collection belonging to the descendants of physician and amateur archaeologist Dr Hans Feriz. In her will, his daughter stipulated that the objects collected by her…

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

Leiden’s Institute for History has an exceptionally strong expertise in premodern European history in its global context, with specialists whose interests cover virtually the whole continent. We have a strong track record in leading larger research teams and work together with colleagues across Europe…

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.

Anna van Buerenplein, Anna van Buerenplein 301, 2595 DG, The Hague

Workshop

More than 40 years ago, a wrecked merchant ship was found in the Wadden Sea. PhD student Geke Burger looked at this archaeological find from a historical perspective.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

Central to Nuranisa’s PhD project is the cultural diplomacy practiced by the Javanese courts of central Java (Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Pakualaman and Mangkunegaran) in response to the increasing Dutch colonial power in the 19th and early 20th century. The Javanese sultanates were incorporated into the…

The goal of this book is to place architectural studies, in which people’s interactions with each other and material resources are key, at the crossing of both landscape studies and material culture studies, where it belongs.

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

The project GRADIENTS investigates what it meant to be European in colonial Africa where identification as European often did not depend on skin colour and was understood on a spectrum with many gradients.

The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655.

We are experts in the fields of languages, cultures, history, arts, societies and philosophy. Together we cover almost all continents and time periods. Knowledge of these disciplines contributes to a humane, safe and sustainable world.

How can you figure out if a skeleton is male or female? How did they brew beer in the distant past? Visitors to ArcheoHotspot could examine archaeological finds and taste prehistoric drinks at the Faculty of Archaeology.

Conference

The P.J. Cosijn Research Fellowship is an initiative to give promising Research MA students of Leiden University with an interest in Anglo-Saxon Studies the opportunity to conduct research on Old English language and literature. The Cosijn Fellowships are part of the ERC-funded project ‘Early Medieval…

How did dynastic organization – that it, the employment of non-ruling family members and the development of dynastic traditions and concepts – influence state formation in both Catholic Europe and Muslim West-Asia?

The archaeological heritage of South America is facing increasing threats due to the expansion of agricultural activities, infrastructure expansion, illegal wood harvesting, and the current fire emergency plaguing the Amazon and other biomes of the continent.

What is the role of local Caribbean individuals and communities in creating and perpetuating archaeological heritage? How has archaeological knowledge been integrated into education plans in different countries?

Bandura Witharana defended his thesis on 27 September 2018

Located in the small Kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Daǧ (c. 50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars

Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused…

This project aims at recording and safeguarding parts of the intangible cultural heritage of the Dogon in central Mali. A major song cycle, the baja ni, forms an integral part of Dogon funeral traditions. The song cycle is attributed to Abirè, a blind Dogon poet/prophet, probably from the 19th c., who…

As of 1 September , Karel Berkhoff has been appointed professor by special appointment in Ukrainian History. In this position, made possible in part by the KNAW, he will focus primarily on dark moments in recent Ukrainian history: the persecutions that have taken place in the first half of the twentieth…

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

This research project analyses the use of different, often competing, stereotypical images of Rome in Humanist Latin Poetry, by considering it as strategic appropriation of the classical heritage.

On the 22nd of February, Ami Okabe successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ami on this achievement!

Challenges for the protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources, traditional cultural expressions, and traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples in the international scenario.

Corinne Hofman accepted her appointment as professor of Caribbean archaeology with special attention to those regions with which the Netherlands maintain historical ties.

Recently, Dr Gül Aktürk Hauser took up the position as Assistant Professor at the department of Heritage and Society. Originally an architect, she got caught up in the study of historical vernacular buildings in northeastern Turkey. Now her focus lies on the impact of climate change on cultural heri…

In the Spanish town of Guadalajara, there is a street named ‘Burgemeester Fluiterstraat’, named after a descendant of Leiden migrants who had done well in the South. He was not the only Guadalajara resident with Leiden roots: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a stream of Dutch textile workers…

Conference

Caribbean archaeological heritage is threatened by natural impacts but also increasingly by economic developments, often resulting from the tourist industry. The continuous construction of specific projects for tourists, accompanied by illegal practices such as looting and sand mining, have major impacts…

Uniting an international consortium of scholars, the Skandapurāṇa Project comprises a team of researchers working in fields across the Humanities. We are creating a critical edition of a foundational work of purāṇic literature and, in doing so, tracing the dynamics of a textual tradition to better understand…