World history, connectivity and material culture, edited by Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys. From Cambridge University Press.

Non-urban settlement organization and Roman expansion in the Roman Republic (4th-1st centuries BC)

Embracing the Provinces is a collection of essays focused on people and their daily lives living in the Roman provinces, c. 27 BC-AD 476. It offers an overview of current research on Roman provinces and frontiers, deconstructing some long-held preconceptions and providing refreshing insights into unexplored…

This volume considers the military architecture and its impact on local communities in Rome's eastern frontier, which stretched from the north-east shore of the Black Sea to the Red Sea.

The main research objective is to map the cities of Roman Asia Minor in terms of location, size, urban amenities and juridical status, with the specific aim to understand the reasons how this urban settlement pattern arose.

The Iseum Campense, the impressive sanctuary for Isis and the Egyptian gods on the Campus Martius and arguably one of ancient Rome’s most notable absent presences, is a monument central to various debates.

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

The Leiden Greek and Roman History Team concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

To what extent was labour-induced migration important to the functioning of the towns and cities of Roman Italy?

How does the evolution of the archaeological landscape at Son Sard reveal rural settlement patterns on Mallorca, serving as a pars pro toto for Balearic rural archaeology?

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial…

Can we identify different degrees of economic integration, both within and between regions, on the basis of archaeological proxies?

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

Ancient historians have long been aware that patterns of coin circulation can shed light on levels of economic integration in the Roman Empire. More than forty years ago, Hopkins argued that large amounts of tax money were spent in the frontier provinces and that the non-military provinces recouped…

This project looks at material culture to better understand the character and organization of Roman colonial society in the Republican period, with a focus on the colony of Aesernia (founded 263 BC) in Samnium (modern-day Molise, Italy). What impact did the foundation of the colony have on precolonial…

In the History of the Roman Emperors, what does Herodian’s method of composition consist of and how does it relate to his writing intention, particularly in terms of political and moral idea(l)s?

This PhD project develops and applies a GIS procedure to use legacy survey data in settlement pattern analysis. As part of the research by the LERC project (NWO, Leiden University, KNIR), legacy data produced by surveys in central and southern Italy are examined in a comparative framework to investigate…

New perspectives from archaeology and ancient history

The Greek and Roman History Team concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

ASLU 28 Michalis Karambinis (2015)

This thesis analyses the existence and the functioning of the urban labour market in the early Roman empire by looking at the crucial influence of social structures, such as the family and non-familial labour collectives.

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

The hinterland of important centres like Petra (Southern Jordan) can provide essential information that contribute to the understanding of their rise, expansion and decline.

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.

ASLU 11

In several Mediterranean regions archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits…

Material Culture, Settlements, and Landscapes from the Mediterranean to Western Asia

The researchers in the World Archaeology department of the Faculty of Archaeology concentrate on a range of different periods and regions: from humanity’s origins to the Middle Ages and the modern age, and from Asia to South America.

This project aims to explore the environmental impact of early Roman expansion (4th/3rd century BC) through a program of dating and ecological sampling of traces of field systems (centuriations).

An environmental and palaeo-economic reconstruction.

Publication on the excavations at Roman fort Matilo in Leiden

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

How do we explain the fact that certain areas had many large cities, while other areas were studded with large numbers of small towns and yet other areas had very few urban agglomerations of any kind?

On the 17th of June Rea Matsangou successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The conquest by Rome brought profound changes to large parts of Europe. Unprecedented infrastructural works were created, towns sprang up, a ribbon of fortresses was laid out along the frontiers.

Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history.

Caspar Reuvens, the world’s first Professor of Archaeology, was a prominent classical scholar and from his appointment in 1818 onwards Classical & Mediterranean Archaeology has been an important field of research in Leiden.

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of the Mediterranean, deepening your understanding of this fascinating region. From the many faces of ‘Hellenism’ to the early rise of the Roman Republic, to the voyages of European Crusaders in medieval times. The archaeology…

One of the three long-term research interests of our group concerns the Transformation of the Roman World (c AD 450-900).

Assessing the effects of landscape and land-use changes on the visibility of archaeological landscapes in Central-Southern Italy.

Objects, Appropriation and Cultural Change

How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work?

Whether implicitly or explicitly, we all have ideas about how the law is supposed to function, whose interests it should represent, and what role it should play in society. This project explores the ways in which these questions are addressed in the works of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus…

This new handbook by Frits Naerebout and Henk Singor places the history of the Greeks and Romans within the larger context of the contemporary Eurasian world.

The Animated Image addresses the entire range of contexts in which images were described by Roman authors as being animated, as well as the accounts that Roman writers produced to explain the animation of inanimate matter.

At the Faculty of Archaeology, we investigate the development of human societies worldwide, from the earliest beginnings to modern times. We also study the heritage of mankind, which evokes this deep history, and which connects with, and informs, contemporary society.

The past, present, and future for local people and archaeologists in Sudanese Nubia