World Archaeology in Leiden encompasses the study of societies, cultures, and human behaviour from the past, aiming to reconstruct and revive them. With our mix of education and research you lay a strong foundation for an international career in archaeology or heritage management.

Leiden is a winning combination of being small and fun, yet big in character as a student city. It’s also conveniently close to cities like Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, which can all be reached by train in just 30 minutes.

The master’s programme in Book and Digital Media Studies introduces you to the history of the written and printed word, and to theories and practices of publishing as well as digital textual media.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations programme in Egyptology offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

Would you like to do collection-oriented research, but do not have sufficient resources? Every year, the Museums, Collections and Society (MCS) research group makes several research scholarships available for this purpose. Researchers Elizabeth den Hartog and Marika Keblusek previously received an MCS…

Taking responsibility concerning colonial heritage and restitution is a pressing issue for countries and museums worldwide. On 23 and 24 May, a Leiden University interdisciplinary symposium will explore new perspectives as a basis for policies. Organising professors Carsten Stahn and Pieter ter Keurs…

The Netherlands returned 478 artefacts to Indonesia and Sri Lanka this week, on the advice of a Dutch committee. Rightly so, says Leiden professor Pieter ter Keurs from the Museums, Collections and Society interdisciplinary research programme. ‘But do make it clear why you are returning something.’

In the spring of 2024 the Faculty of Archaeology welcomed a new postdoc. Dr Adam Benfer, originally from the United States, occupies a double position as a researcher in the project of Alex Geurds and as the Faculty’s Data Steward. ‘It is pretty much what the title says: I steward data. Essentially,…

Leiden Professor of Museums, Collections and Society, Pieter ter Keurs, conducts research into the provenance of museum collections. This is important for the return of heritage. But Ter Keurs is interested in why people collect at all.

The purpose of LENS is to foster, coordinate and support research of visual media of analog and digital photography, film, and video, and the visual arts.

Investigating domestic crafts and subsistence activities through experiments and material analysis

Dennis C. Nieweg finished his MA thesis in 2000 on “Shells in archaeology”

If you have a question, there are various ways to get in touch with us.

Do you want to apply for this master’s programme at Leiden University? Find out how to apply for your programme by following the step-by step guide below.

Leiden houses the oldest university in the Netherlands, 13 museums, and 23 kilometres of canals with 88 bridges.

Organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino, the indigenous people of the Caribbean encountered by Columbus

Mazatec chants and ancient Mesoamerican pictography

The project re-examines the role of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries in the cultural and social developments of the Middle East and their interactions with the indigenous communities, from the nineteenth century until today. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’…

Time, Religion and Sacred Discourses of the Ayuuk People

The ability to create objects and structures with our hands has been essential to human development. This ability is something modern society is at risk of losing. Leiden archaeologists gather knowledge about ancient processes of ‘making and creating’ over the centuries, knowledge that helps our current…

JUSTREMIT is an ERC-funded project that brings together political theory, ethnography, and security studies in an interdisciplinary study of remittances and global justice.

Overview of the main research projects at the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Seven years ago, Aris Politopoulos left Athens for a master’s programme at the Leiden Faculty of Archaeology. Now he has nearly finished his PhD dissertation. Furthermore, he has become a lecturer at the research group for the Archaeology of the Near East, and co-founded a foundation that deals with…

Computer scientist Tessa Verhoef received a Best Paper Award during the ‘ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility’. The paper emphasised the need for interdisciplinary research in sign language processing. The authors state that linguists and computer scientists should collaborate with…

This section provides an overview of online tools for the study of the medieval Low Countries. The websites linked down below are often times both available in Dutch and English.

Dutch archaeologists are making three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of archaeological objects lost in the Syrian civil war.

There’s more to a master’s than studying hard; sometimes you just want to relax. It’s good to know that The Hague’s offering in the area of sport and culture is second to none.

Archaeology in Leiden encompasses the study of societies, cultures, and human behaviour from the past, aiming to reconstruct and revive them. With our mix of education and research you lay a strong foundation for an international career in archaeology or heritage management.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) aims to demonstrate its relevance to society by means of high-quality research, excellent education and various outreach activities. A few highlights:

Theft, prostitution, fortune-telling or murder. Historian Manon van der Heijden and a group of students are researching court records from The Hague from 1600 to 1800. They are tracing crimes and offenders and shedding new light on The Hague’s Gevangenpoort (or Prison Gate). Among their many discoveries…

Research conducted in this group aims at furthering our understanding of how communities and individuals deal with social change, conflict and trauma through remembrance and commemoration as well as forgetting in the arts.

On Tuesday October 11th, ACPA’s PhD-candidate Frank Blokland will publicly defend his thesis “On the origin of patterning in movable Latin type: Renaissance standardisation, systematisation, and unitisation of textura and roman type”.

The documentary Einstein’s Light by director Nickolas Barris shows in a dazzling manner what scientific breakthroughs resulted from the special friendship between Albert Einstein and the Leiden physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. The documentary premiered at the Leiden International Film Festival on 2…

Translating ancient texts, filling in missing parts of clay tablets: articles are popping up more and more often about the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence for researching documents in the oldest scripts. Are we better off leaving the deciphering of ancient texts to computers from now…

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.

How can we tell whether and how a prehistoric weapon was used? How can we better understand the dexterity and combat skills involved in Bronze Age spear fighting? A research team from Leiden and Göttingen University present a new approach to answering these questions: they simulated the actual fight…

This project investigates ancient water management of streams, springs and runoffs on the archaeological site of Monte Albán, Mexico, as a means to contribute with different stakeholders in the development of sustainable solutions to water problems today such as floods and scarcity.

Análisis y Conversión del Vocabulario de fray Francisco de Alvarado (1593)

Reproducing past, present and future: colonial visions and experience in Asia in the residencies

Could an emergent Cinema of Un-Belonging discover forms of narrative time relevant to the long-term, inter-generational fractures caused by forced traumatic dispersion?

Spirited narratives of purpose and progress: church-society engagement alongside the (Company-) state

The research involves the application and combination of archaeological and archaeometrical methodologies. Petrographic analysis and isotopic provenance studies of raw materials and exotics, and the study of the distribution patterns of these materials are used to gain insight into the exchange of goods…

This book offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of multilingualism among the Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish languages on the coffee frontier of Southern Peru, set against the backdrop of economic transformation and deforestation in the world’s last great forest.

There is little evidence of the routes connecting Amerindian communities in the Caribbean prior to and just after 1492. Uncovering possible canoe routes between these communities can help to explain the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical links in their social and material networks.…

The application of compliance archaeology techniques such as mechanical large scale excavations where large quantities of data are gathered in relatively little time (and relatively inexpensively) and a firm post-excavation research phase yielded a whole new body of archaeological evidence.

Lecture, COGLOSS lecture

Our researchers 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.