Living in a Wetland Landscape: The Late Neolithic Vlaardingen Culture Revisited - Leiden, the Netherlands
On Friday, March 13th, 2026, the symposium "Living in a Wetland Landscape: the Late Neolithic Vlaardingen Culture Revisited" took place in the Van Steenis Building of the Leiden University Faculty of Archaeology.
The symposium brought together the main results of the project "Putting Life into Late Neolithic Houses: Investigating Domestic Craft and Subsistence Activities through Experiments and Material Analysis."
The project, coming to a close after five years of collaborative research, aimed to re-evaluate the wetland sites of the Late Neolithic Vlaardingen culture, using new methods of analysis, archaeological experiments, and public participation to better understand daily life in the Rhine/Meuse delta during the Late Neolithic (3400–2500 BC).
Interdisciplinarity has been a key element of the research project, bringing together a team of archaeological specialists, craftspeople, and open-air public centres. The main partners of the project were Masamuda, NWO, Universiteit Leiden, and the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap).
EXARC has also played an important role in the project by disseminating many of the results via the EXARC Journal, featuring several open-access articles produced by the research team, as well as through its social media channels.
EXARC is pleased to have collaborated on this project and would like to thank all the main partners for their valuable contributions and fruitful cooperation. An event review is currently being written and will soon be published in the EXARC Journal.
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