Nine Archaeology students have built a reconstruction of an early medieval house in Vlaardingen. The house, built according to a houseplan discovered during excavations at Rotta, has already played an important role as the backdrop of the re-enactment of the battle of Vlaardingen of 1018.

Farming practices, food production, and the agricultural potential of the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE) Argive Plain, Greece

Promotor: R. Tijdeman, Co-promotor: H.J.J. te Riele

Update : March 2020 Director: Professor Dr Harco Willems (KU Leuven), co-director Dr Marleen De Meyer (KU Leuven & NVIC)

Large-scale forest fires started by prehistoric hunter-gatherers are probably the reason why Europe is not more densely forested. This is the finding of an international team, including climate researcher Professor Jed Kaplan of the University of Lausanne and archaeologist Professor Jan Kolen of Leiden…

The study of orchid flowers, fruits, and inflorescences is crucial due to the remarkable diversity of orchid species and their unique adaptations to pollinators and seed dispersers. However, our understanding of the evolution and development of these organs within the orchid family remains limited.

We have studied shape with a particular focus on the zebrafish model system. The shape is an essential appearance of the phenotype of a biological specimen and it can be used to read out a current state or response or to study gene expression.

CurveBend project aims to study the restauration of biodiversity in livestock landscapes through collective action, practical solutions, and research on ecological knowledge co-creation.

In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas.

Ancient peoples might have harnessed the power of fire to modify their environment

Promotor: J. Zaanen

This thesis describes the use of the evolutionary approach in the study of language change, aiming to provide a better insight in the mechanisms that play a role in language change and to validate this approach in the field of language change.

The Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development and Benghazi Centre for Law and Society Studies, Benghazi University have released their final report, in English and Arabic, on Assessing Legislation for Libya’s Reconstruction.

In the civil war in Syria, the country's cultural heritage is also under threat. There have been further acts of vandalism in Palmyra and many of the city's museums have been looted. Leiden archaeologist Olivier Nieuwenhuijse's Focus Raqqa project aims to make a digital inventory of the plundered archaeology…

The main purpose of this book is to give a description of the Cholón language as represented in the Arte de la lengua cholona (ALC), a colonial grammar written in 1748 by a Franciscan friar, named Pedro de la Mata. The ALC was transcribed by Fray Gerónimo Clota in 1772. This grammar is kept in the British…

The mycorrhizal symbiosis is among the most widespread species interactions on Earth⁠. This thesis focuses on orchid mycorrhiza, a unique mycorrhizal type that has caught scientists’ attention for centuries⁠.

What does site patterning reveal about the social landscape dynamics across the historical divide?

Investigating domestic crafts and subsistence activities through experiments and material analysis

An integrated geo-archaeological research of the hominin site Trinil on Java

This study presents an agent-based simulation model exploring the patterns of presence and absence of Late Pleistocene Neanderthals in western Europe.

The starting point of human-induced landscape changes has been under permanent debate. It is widely accepted that the emergence of agriculture strongly increased human impact on their environments. However, foragers can and do actively transform land cover and ecosystems. Ethnographic observations,…

Promotores: R. Tijdeman, K.J. Batenburg

The expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin to Tenerife, Mauritius, Australia, Timor and South Africa in 1800-1804 is fully researched in regard to ornithology.

Promotor: S.J. Edixhoven, Co-promotor: K.J. Batenburg

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

As part of the TerraNova project, a European research initiative on the study of landscape histories and futures, a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) was developed. Anastasia Nikulina was one of the main chapter coordinators who worked on this course, and she worked on the part about modelling in landscape…

This dissertation assesses the influence of British Celtic on the phonological development of English during and shortly after the Anglo-Saxon settlement period, ca. AD 450-700.

Promotores: K.J. Batenburg, B. Koren

On 8 July, the symposium 'The digital reconstruction of the crucifixion of the Lindau master (ca. 1425)' will take place at the auditorium of Museum Catharijnecovent, from where it will also be broadcasted online.

A global synthesis of the extent, diversity and patterns in off-site fire use by historically documented and current hunter-gatherers with the remit of this study in the deeper past.

Built Environment and Domestic Material Culture in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Cyclades, Greece (13th – 20th Centuries AD)

The project '‘The Temporality of Images: Merleau-Ponty’s Visual Ontology and its Resonances with Chinese Landscape Painting.’, in the most concise terms, explores ontological questions through the lens of images, drawing on phenomenology, iconology, art history, and comparative philosophy.

This study looks at the diverse phonological systems found within Central Chadic, and reconstructs the phonological system of their ancestor language.

William Pestle and Jason Laffoon recently published a new article entitled 'Quantitative paleodietary reconstruction with complex foodwebs: An isotopic case study from the Caribbean' in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

A palaeogeographical reconstruction of Bronze Age West-Frisia (2000-800 BC)

December 2020 saw the crowning publication of the Landscapes of Survival project by Professor Peter Akkermans. Its main topic is human habitation in marginal environments like the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. ‘The people living here built their own society, and they would not have viewed it as…

This dissertation provides an overview of the phonological developments of the Qinghai-Gansu languages, comparing them to the reconstructed ancestral language.

Computer scientists from Leiden University and the University of Münster describe a new theoretical starting point for approaching difficult optimization problems. They can take into account several criteria simultaneously, instead of just one at a time.

A number of scholars joint forces to analyse and re-analyse a number of Merovingian cemeteries and publish the results in the series Merovingian Archaeology in the Low Countries published by Habelt Verlag in Bonn (Germany). We call it the ANASTASIS project. This is the third volume in which the data…

On December 16th 23 students of the Institute of Environmental Sciences of Leiden University took part of the first total species inventory to assess the effectiveness of an underwater landscape that was build in March 2003 to restore the biodiversity in an area where the environment was destroyed by…

How can pre-Islamic poetry be used as a source to reconstruct the history of central Arabia at the dawn of Islam?

The Ager Venusinus Project studies the relatively small number of recognized colonial dwellings dated securely to the period of colonization (i.e. the 3rd century BC). With a special interest in the Black Gloss ceramic typochronology