News
NWO Vidi Grant for Shiyanthi Thavapalan
Assyriologist Shiyanthi Thavalapan has received NWO Vidi funding for her research, An Anthropology of the Material World in Ancient Mesopotamia. The funding offers her the opportunity to develop an innovative line of research and establish a research group to clarify the way in which Mesopotamians conducted science.
HOVO Flitscolleges (Flash lectures)
On the HOVO YouTube channel, you can watch four free flash lectures on a variety of topics. Each lecture is a maximum of 20 minutes and offers an interesting way to get acquainted with the courses and instructors at HOVO Amsterdam.
System in cuneiform
By collecting tens of thousands of spellings of names, historian Cornell Thissen discovered that there is a consistent system in the way Neo-Babylonian names are spelled. "This allows us to gain a better understanding of Neo-Babylonian history, especially economic history."
Reliable information?
With the rise of generative AI, unreliable information can easily be disseminated on a large-scale, with potentially serious consequences. At the same time, language models trained and evaluated on high-quality datasets can offer a solution, according to research by linguist Chantal van Son.
History rewritten
In 2021, during an exhibition in the Rijksmuseum about slavery, an elongated piece of wood with some holes in it was on display. It was assumed that this was a so-called tronco, a wooden restraint that would have been used on 17th-century plantations in Dutch Brazil to bind slaves by the ankles. A number of scholars, including Hans Piena, professor by special appointment of Dutch Cultural History, examined the object using a new, forensic method and came to a surprising conclusion: "We are rewriting history."
NWO Veni grant for Flora Schilt
Geoarchaeologist Flora Schilt has been awarded a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for her new research project: SPARKS - Unravelling the Ancient Fire Tapestry: a Study of Pyrotechnology, Archaeological Traditions, and Forager Mobility in Central Africa. With the Veni grant, she will investigate fire remnants from early hunter-gatherers to learn more about the development of fire use by this group of people.
magazine for humanities alumni december 2024