The hills overlooking the north flank of the Rhine valley in the Netherlands are dotted with hundreds of prehistoric burial mounds. Only a few of them were ever investigated by archaeologists, and even nowadays the many barrows preserved in the extensive forests of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug are the oldest visible witnesses of a remote, but largely unknown prehistoric past.

In 2006, a team of archaeologists of the Ancestral Mounds project of Leiden University set out to investigate these age-old...

The Archaeology of the First Farmer-Herders in Egypt explores how and why farming and herding started in the Fayum, which is a large oasis with a permanent lake in the Egyptian Western Desert. Noriyuki Shirai's research on lithic artefacts used by the Epipalaeolithic hunter-fishers and Neolithic famer-herders in the Fayum gives a clue as to the mobility and residential strategy of the Fayum people and their time and labour investments in tool production. The Neolitic famer-herders ( 6th C.B.C...

By applying a fieldwork-based, geoarchaeological approach, Tourloukis examines in this study the evidence from Greece within the framework of the earliest occupation of Europe. Although the Greek Peninsula lies within a core area of early hominin movements between Africa and Europe but also within Eurasia itself, the Lower Palaeolithic record of Greece remains as yet extremely poor.

Choosing the scanty Greek record as a case-study, Tourloukis elaborates on a hitherto largely overlooked subjec...

This study is a contribution to the household archaeology of the Caribbean. The aim of the research was to come to a material definition of the precolonial house, rather than rely on the few, short, Spanish colonial descriptions. Archaeological research from the indigenous Taíno site of El Cabo in the Dominican Republic is presented and seven centuries of community history from development and growth, to eventual demise after European contact is narrated through the dominant structure, the h...

In 2006 Leiden University has initiated a series Leiden Dissertations at Leiden University Press. This series affords an opportunity to those who have recently obtained their doctorate to publish the results of their doctoral research so as to ensure a wide distribution among colleagues and the interested public. The dissertations will become available both in printed and in digital versions. Books from this LUP series can be ordered through www.lup.nl.

The large majority of Leiden dissertati...