Volume 20 contains eight articles based on research of the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.

The Dutch TV programme Keuringsdienst van Waarde investigated the origin of BBQ taste. Prehistoric fire expert Andrew Sorensen was invited to explain prehistoric fire making techniques.

Eine Archäobotanische untersuchung zu Umwelt und Landwirtschaft der Ältesten Bankkeramik.

Within the space of a few months, the Heritage Quest citizen science project, whereby volunteers scan elevation maps of the Veluwe area for burial mounds and other prehistoric remains, has already led to groundbreaking new insights. Hundreds of burial mounds have been found, as have a huge number of…

Dean prof. Willem Willems has visited Japan from 8-10 September, at the invitation of the Aomori District Council in northern Honshu. Purpose of the visit was to provide assistance in the nomination process for World Heritage Site of 15 prehistoric Jomon Culture sites in northern Honshu and Hokkaido…

Papers written on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the institute of Prehistory, Volume II.

The Faculty of Archaeology has a long research tradition in the municipality of Oss. Since 1974, researchers and students have been carrying out archaeological research here. In Januari 2019, an enormous replica of one of the top local finds was unveiled standing in the middle of a roundabout.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

An environmental and palaeo-economic reconstruction.

ASLU 11

Archaeologists often use the percentages of heat-affected stone or bone artifacts found at archaeological sites as a way to determine how frequently fire was used by the inhabitants. Andrew Sorensen and Fulco Scherjon have come up with a computer model called 'fiReproxies' to simulate how fires used…

After 30 days of work, the experimental reconstruction of the iron age canoe of Vlaardingen Vergulde Hand is finished! Its maiden voyage will take place on Friday the 16th of February when it will be paddled for the first time by schoolchildren from Vlaardingen.

For thousands of years, the prehistoric communities of the Low Countries followed their own path, compared with the rest of Europe. An international research team has now published these findings in Nature.

A Paleoecological Study of Sittard, Stein, Elsloo and Hienheim

Also including: Wateringen 4 & Acquiring a taste.

The reconstruction of a dress worn in the Netherlands nearly 3000 years ago has gone on display in Oss, and shows that, contrary to popular opinion, woman from that time liked cheerful colours. Leiden archaeologists were involved in both the find of the dress as well as its reconstruction.

Close contact between women and dogs in prehistoric times Women and dogs were in close contact in the neolithic age of hunters-fishers-gatherers. This has been suggested by Leiden osteoarchaeologist Dr Andrea Waters-Rist and fellow researchers who have studied a tiny biological fossil. The fossil was…

Papers written on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Institute of Prehistory, Volume I.

Festschrift for Prof. Dr Raymond H.A. Corbey in celebration of his 70th birthday

Het NIMAR is een instituut van de Universiteit Leiden dat studenten van verschillende studierichtingen de mogelijkheid biedt om zich te verdiepen in de Marokkaanse cultuur.

In the largest study of ancient DNA ever conducted, an international team of scientists has revealed the complex story behind one of the defining periods in European prehistory. The study is published this week in the journal Nature.

Building a fire involves many variables, such as size, choice of fuel, temperature, and burn time, that affect the way the generated heat can be used, and therefore the potential function of a fire. A group of Leiden archaeologists are, together with a team of international colleagues, investigating…

People in the Early Bonze Age used bronze artefacts as a means of payment. This is the conclusion reached by archaeologists Maikel Kuijpers and Catalin Popa in a PLOS ONE article published on 20 January.

In 2018, Sorensen’s research into the fire-making habits of the Neanderthals reached the headlines all over the world. Now, a Veni grant will enable him to continue his fire-related investigation, focusing more on our own distant ancestors.

The Faculty of Archaeology produces several journals

Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies 21, 2005

Within the scope of Leiden European City of Science, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) presented the quadrennial Lorentz Medal to Daan Frenkel in the Academy Building yesterday. The ceremony was in collaboration with the Lorentz Center and was attended by Robbert Dijkgraaf, Minister…

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies 20, 2004

Indonesian newspaper Pikiran Rakyat has published a series of seven articles about Leiden entitled ‘Two impressive weeks in Leiden.’ The articles were inspired by the symposium ‘The Role of Women in Sustainable Development in Indonesia,’ which took place in Leiden from 23 May to 3 June 2017.

Leiden University is in third place in the Netherlands for the percentage of women professors, behind the Open University and Radboud University in Nijmegen. This is reported in the Review of Women Professors 2018.

Another successful edition (the fourth!) of the Leiden Alumni in Brussels event took place on 23 February. With a fully booked registration list, it already promised to be a great success in advance. The event took place at the Baker McKenzie location right in the centre of Brussels. As the area was…

Leiden University and the Leiden Bio Science Park can make a significant contribution to the earning capacity of the Netherlands. This is the finding of the National Investment Agenda presented today.

Every week, Uwe Hensch walks past the Old Observatory in Leiden. In corona times, he decided to make a LEGO design of the historic building. His design is now finished and might go into production. You can help to make it happen.

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,…

Over the years, many spectacular archaeological finds have been washed ashore on the Dutch coast. Among these a large assemblage of barbed points made of bone and antler from the Mesolithic (11,000-8000 BC). The species used by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to manufacture their barbed points remained…

Dirk Huyge (Director) & Wouter Claes (Vice-Director)

Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies 23, 2007

Case-studies on use-wear analysis of prehistoric flint tools

ASLU 13

Archaeological research of coastal farming communities on the southern North Sea coast, 2000-800 BC

How did persistent social inequalities first emerge? What cultural trajectories and institutions made this key development possible? How can archaeological inform us about the formation of class societies?

The project Deconstructing Stability aims to improve reconstructions of late prehistoric landscapes and predictive models for the purpose of archaeological heritage management.

Nowadays, most Europeans speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. However, very different languages were spoken on our continent before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The EUROLITHIC project tries to find answers to the question which languages these were and where they came…

The Laboratory for Human Osteoarchaeology specialises in the macroscopic and microscopic analysis of human remains. We use cutting edge scientific approaches to address archaeological, historical, and anthropological research questions. In addition to paleopathological, histological, and 3D scanning…

Cultural identity at the Late Prehistoric settlement of Aguas Buenas, Nicaragua, AD 500-1522

D. Fontijn, Quentin Bourgeois & Arjan Louwen (eds) (2012). This publication describes the history of “barrow landscape” near Echoput in Apeldoorn. Two burial mounds were examined and it became clear that our prehistoric predecessors carefully managed and maintained the open area for a long time, before…