The Roman conquest ushered in major changes in society, technology and organisational complexity, also altering the nature of people’s relationship with landscapes and material culture.

This course deals with issues related to two regions on the fringes of the Roman empire. On the one side the wetland frontiers of the Roman province Germania Inferior are addressed, and on the other hand the desert frontier and landscapes of the Roman province Arabia.

Classes will predominantly focus on aspects related to water, and its effects on inter alia logistics, trade, the military, subsistence strategies and ritual practices.
During these classes it will become clear that we can observe quite some contrasts and dichotomies between the considered regions, but that there are also some remarkable similarities and analogies.

This course offers a comprehensive overview of the archaeology of Greek culture in the Aegean and beyond, that is the overseas settlements along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The course is structured along two basic lines: a chronological and a thematic one. We will start with the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations of the Late Bronze Age, then continue with the Early Iron Age (also called “Dark Age”) and the Archaic period to finally reach the Classical time, which is often regarded as Greece’s heyday. Altogether, we will trace Greek culture over a timespan of more than a millennium, between ca. 1400 and 330 BCE. We will discuss the Greeks in a Mediterranean perspective, looking at their interaction with other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures.

The second baseline considers major aspects of Greek society: cities and countryside, art and handicraft, society and gender, religion and cult, identity and the perception of otherness. We will follow these topics through time and analyse the developments. We will discuss current
academic debates together in class.

This course will explore various aspects of the manifestation of the Crusades in the Mediterranean and in the Near East: ranging from the conquest of Sicily and southern Italy by the Normans (1000-1130 C.E.) to the fall of Akko in the Holy Land (1291 C.E.).

The aim is to address how we can study the Crusades from an archaeological perspective, and what the archaeological data can tell us about the nature of these events.

This course provides an overview of some key material categories recovered during excavations in Greece (of different periods) and/or present in relevant museum collections. The durable materials such as ceramics and stone stand out in their preservation and reach for study, but when organic in nature, objects and materials are often less well preserved upon excavation (if at all), especially when excavated a long time ago.
The taught classes will make you familiar with the nature and properties of these materials and will provide you with an understanding of the different production processes through which objects and (built) features were produced with these materials.

You will learn to recognise the single materials in objects or composite items of a wide range of scales, and be able to describe important technological features of organic and composite objects and their production processes. The range of materials will be contextualized in their temporal and spatial context. You will also become familiar with various theoretical aspects concerning activity areas, workshops, and how production processes affected people’s surroundings and vice versa.

What was it like to live in the Mediterranean region during the first millennium CE? The 5th century CE witnessed the end of the western Roman Empire and the start of the early medieval period, where traditionally the ‘origins’ of modern-day western European society have been placed.

The nature of the transition has long been an important focus of debate. Some scholars have emphasised the ‘decline’ and ‘collapse’ of imperial institutions and the disruption caused by the barbarian invasions, whereas others have focused on evidence for continuity and the important role of the Church in establishing new forms of governance.

Important difficulties are caused by the scarcity of textual sources for this period, and the impact of contemporary socio-political concerns on developing scholarly views during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries.
Archaeological data can shed important new light on the developments taking place during the first millennium CE, in particular with respect to the dynamics of everyday life. Changing modes of living are best reconstructed through a thematic and inclusive approach, using all available evidence to shed light on different aspects of people’s lives.

This course is centered around the concept of Ancient Networks, which it explores in a multifaceted way: 1) the application of network theory to study connections between ancient sites and peoples, 2) the conceptual and interpretative framework of network visualizations to re-examine historical narratives about the ancient world, 3) specific archaeological case studies from the wider Mediterranean region.

For this course, the thematic focus will be on various Phoenician/Punic sites and connections across the Mediterranean world in the first millennium BCE, including sites and data from North Africa, southern Spain, and southern Italy. Each lecture will feature a specific archaeological example, which is then explored and expanded within an applied as well as interpretative analysis.