What was the function of the Dutch Protestant Church in Sri Lankan society? Why did people relate to the Church and how did conversion influence their life course?

Amerindian settlement patterns and early colonial cartography in Northern Hispaniola

How have human-environmental entanglements changed in the Gulf of San Miguel, Darien, Panama, from the first traces human practices through to the present?

If a society is to be secure, sustainable and resilient, conflicting interests must be reconciled. Researchers at Leiden University study the behaviour of individuals, groups and states in relation to this issue, and use their knowledge to promote equality within and between communities.

Mazatec chants and ancient Mesoamerican pictography

The oldest paleoanthropological archive in the world, the Eugène Dubois archive, was presented to Naturalis Biodiversity Center on 13 January. Leiden professor, Jan Slikkerveer, who was the owner of the archive and spent years researching it, handed it over to Naturalis Director, Edwin van Huis, under…

The CADS Asia Research Cluster extends the legacy of the Institute’s Asia focus into the future, as an important hub in international networks on the study of Asia and through active engagement with colleagues in Asia. Within the Institute the Asia Research Cluster offers a platform for anthropologists…

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.

A biographical approach to material cultural interactions between Caribbean communities and Europeans across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800)

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

The Museums, Collections & Society (MCS) group consists of staff members, all of whom have a strong link to the Museums and Collections programme of the Faculty of Humanities and the Heritage and Museum programme of the Faculty of Archaeology.

What can continuity and change in the manufacturing of locally made ceramics from the early colonials Spanish towns of Concepción de la Vega, Cotuí and Nueva Cádiz (1492-1600) tell us about the choices people made in ceramic production as a reaction the the changing social environment?

What workflow of non-destructive techniques provides accurate, valuable data to improve our understanding of Caribbean archaeological landscapes? How were Amerindian settlements configured?

This special issue of the International Forestry Review talks about how logging really affects society.

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of the Americas, deepening your understanding of this large region.

An EU-project full of suggestions for cultural associations...

On 10 May, GTGC Chair Prof. Jan Aart Scholte, presented the paper ‘Legitimacy in Global Governance: A Cross-Level Analysis’ at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.

Big Science, commonly defined as conventional science made big in three dimensions, namely organizations, machines, and politics, brings a plethora of different stakeholders together, often for a long period of time. This includes policymakers, scientists, (scientific) managers as well as local “host”…

This book explores intercultural management challenges in sub-Saharan Africa through a case study of Vasco Silva, a Portuguese businessman in Luanda, Angola.

On 15 February 2024, Alexandros Sarris defended the thesis 'International Law and Governance of the Arctic in an Era of Climate Change'. The doctoral research was supervised by Nico Schrijver and Freya Baetens.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

The project aims to explore Eurasian elk's role in the ecosystems of the past and its relationship with humans through analysis of its distribution and habitat in the Netherlands.

This dissertation is concerned with the study of the less than twenty remaining precolonial Mesoamerican codices. By considering these rare and fragile pictographic and hieroglyphic books from the cultural biography perspective, many different aspects of these books can be studied.

This dissertation presents a legal geographical analysis of the heritage laws of the independent English-speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Material Culture Studies revolves around the analysis of the cultural biographies of all sorts of material objects from flint axes, to pottery, to houses and monumental structures.

Museum Studies looks at museum practices from archaeological, historical and anthropological perspectives.

Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria - South Africa

In this book chapter, Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga unpack the indigenous category

This pilot project will initiate research on how heritage has been and can be mobilized to address climate change governance in Himalayan Asia. Climate adaptation strategies frequently include the sourcing of heritage, encompassing landscapes, built environments 4 and cultural practices. However, effective…

This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.

Landscape history, representation and identity in the Grenada islandscape

El pueblo Kamëntšá en la encrucijada del patrimonio cultural

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

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

This book is about the archaeology of indigenous peoples who thrived across the Caribbean, the Guianas, and the Lower Amazon basin just before the European invasion, and who also remained central to the early history of conquest and colonization.

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences with Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan.

DIGIFOOD is a transnational research project that investigates how data governance can support equitable and sustainable digital food systems. Around the world, digital technologies are transforming agriculture. Sensors in soil, satellites in space, and mobile phones in farmers’ hands are generating…

As Bolivia reels from the collapse of the government in November 2019, a wave of social protests, and now the impact of Covid-19, this book asks: where next for Bolivia?

The civilizations of ancient China and Mesoamerica, although not historically related and obviously different in many specific aspects (such as language and writing), show many interesting commonalities and similar tendencies in their cultural manifestations.

The rise and fall of Dutch Brazil (1624-1654) was a major news story in early modern Europe, and marked the emergence of a

This research examines cultural pathways as a tool, methodology and framework for advancing climate action in the Anglophone Caribbean through the integration of archaeological, ethnographic, and community-based knowledge.

On 3 May2017 LAPP participated in a meeting on microplastics at the Plastic Soup Foundation.

The Student Cabinet, a shadow cabinet with students from the Dutch universities, has presented its first ‘coalition agreement’. As Minister for New Democracy, Leiden student Zeineb Romdhane says inclusion should form ‘the basis of our democracy’.

Dr. Moritz Jesse, associate professor for European Law gave two presentations at the annual conference of the Council for European Studies, which took place in the city of Chicago, end of March 2018.

LUGO got the opportunity to present the Green Paper at the third lunch session of the Liveable Planet initiative on the 25th of May.