EVENTS
CRASIS Annual Meeting & Master Class – 5 and 6 March 2026
The Annual Meeting and Masterclass is a two-day event, designed to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas about the ancient Mediterranean world across traditional disciplinary boundaries among graduate students, postdocs, and established scholars
Joint BAP & SAMPL Congres 2026 (in Dutch) – 13 March 2026
BAP and SAMPL are the associations for specialist researchers of ecological remains and material culture in Dutch Archaeology. This year they will combine their annual conferences under the title ‘Samengesteld’. Research by multiple specialists on composite material, inorganic as well as organic, or material culture that is both artefact and ecofact, forms the central theme. Presentations will be held by seven speakers, both junior and senior researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium. Presentations will be in Dutch.
Workshop Academic Poster Presentation – 18 March 2026
Presenting an academic poster at a conference can be a daunting prospect, and sometimes a frustrating experience. How should you prepare for presenting your poster, and how do you get people to engage with you?
What makes an academic poster appealing, a good read, and attractive to an audience that passes a tenfold of posters in a short amount of time? How do you prepare for presenting your research to a small audience (often only one person), that can interrupt you at any time, and may ask you in-depth questions about your research?
During this workshop, participants will learn what the do’s and don’ts are of making a scientific poster, and how to present it.
Athens Spring School “Audio Visual Methods in Collaborative Archaeology: Exploring the Politics of Heritage” – 20-28 March 2026
During this course, participants will collaboratively produce short films featuring alternative archaeological narratives about the many relationships between the people, archaeological materiality, and discourse. Only a limited number of successful videos will be given the permission by the Institute to be uploaded on social media and to be presented on various venues after the school. Dedication to this course is full time during the stay in Athens.
Transformations conference – 7-10 April 2026
Major changes occurred worldwide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Changes in climate, physical landscape, ecology and human subsistence and cultures. How these changes happened, and what implications they had, is best researched by joining traditional archaeology with archaeological science-based approaches like geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, archaezoology, isotope studies and palaeogenetics. Goal of the “Transformations” conference is to discuss the various transformations during the Mesolithic and Neolithic, how they interact and influence each other, and the ways they can be investigated. The conference is centred around four themes: Subsistence and Diet, Migration and identity, Use of space and Dynamics vs. Continuity.
SoYA 2026 (Symposium of Young Archaeologists) – 10 April 2026
With its location at the intersection of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, Archaeology is among the most diverse and wide-ranging fields of inquiry; the process of expanding the discipline’s horizon, with attention brought to areas away from the mainstream, is ever-growing. Therefore, the Symposium of Young Archaeologists would like to offer a platform for young academics conducting archaeological research on and of the margins.
Workshop Assessing the Impact of Roman Imperialism on Social, Political, and Economic Landscapes – 10 April 2026
The study of Roman expansion has in the last decades benefitted from a diversity of perspectives from disciplines such as archaeology, classics, history, and epigraphy. However, in order to combine various source types and methodologies, it is important to work with a clear conceptual framework. This workshop therefore aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines and using different theoretical frameworks that together may shed new light on the theme of Roman expansion and its impact on provincial landscapes and societies that were absorbed by Rome.
Dutch Symposium of the Ancient Near East 2026: ‘Rising from the ashes’ – 16 April 2026
The Dutch Symposium of the Ancient Near East (DUSANE) 2026 is collaborative effort between Nabu Na’id, a subgroup of the L.A.S. Terra archaeology study association, and Pleyte, the study association for Ancient Near Eastern studies, to platform ongoing research into the culture, languages and archaeology of ancient West Asia.
ARCHON Day 2026 – 17 April 2026
Every year Archon organizes the ARCHON Day. During this day, we want to bring students, researchers, and professional archaeologists from the commercial sector together to talk about current topics in archaeology. This year the Archon Day will take place on 17 April 2026 and the central topic will be: ‘AI and New Technologies’.
Social and Health Inequality in the Ancient Greek World conference – 30 April 2026
The aim of this KNAW Early Career Partnership Event is to integrate evidence that is often studied in isolation to build a more holistic understanding of how social divisions (gender, wealth, status, occupation, kinship, ethnicity, and locality) shaped social status, identity, health and lived experiences, with a particular interest in marginalised groups. By combining these approaches, this should enable clearer insights into the causes and consequences of health inequality in the past and to highlight its relevance for understanding persistent social problems today. The temporal and geographic scope of this meeting is flexible in taking a broad definition of the ancient Greek world.
Publishing for Early Career Researchers – 11 May 2026
Though publishing your work is very appealing, it can seem a daunting process. Where to start? How to approach this? Do I publish part of my work now or all of it later? And what are the implications for me of open access publications instead of traditional publishing?
This workshop on publishing and publication strategies is aimed at RMA and (starting) PhD students and attempts to address some of these issues.
Continuous online courses
ARCHON has selected some skills courses that can be followed online at your own pace:
- QGIS course
- Working with databases course
- Rchon statistics course
- Drone Archaeology course
- Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeologists
ARCHON members can obtain credits by submitting a report afterwards.
NEWS
A WARM GOODBYE TO OUR CO-CHAIR PROF. JAN PAUL CRIELAARD
Our board’s co-chair, Prof. Jan Paul Crielaard, has been appointed as director of the Netherlands Institute in Athens, as of the 1st of March this year. Because of this, he will step down as ARCHON board member. We want to express our sincere gratitude to Jan Paul for his time and commitment. As co-chair of the board, he has been instrumental in developing ARCHON’s course and positioning it as a platform for debate and collaboration within the Dutch archaeological research community. We wish him every success in his new job and hope he will remain involved in ARCHON! Jan Paul will be replaced by Dr. Sjoerd Kluiving as VU Amsterdam representative to the board. We want to extend a warm welcome to him!
NEW CCvD REPRESENTATIVE
As of January 2026, Dr Maaike de Waal (University of Leiden) will join Dr Rien Polak (Radboud University Nijmegen) as ARCHON representative in the Centraal College van Deskundigen (CCvD) of SIKB. In this position, they will advocate the interests of academic archaeological research within Dutch archaeological heritage management, in collaboration with Femke Tomas (Saxion University), who holds the seat for education.
NEW BOARD MEMBER
As of May 2024, Dr. Heleen van Londen is taking the place of Prof. Vladimir Stissi in the ARCHON Board on behalf of the University of Amsterdam. We are looking forward to have her on board, and extend our thanks to Vladimir for his long service in the ARCHON Board.
NEW ARCHON COORDINATOR
We are happy to announce that from 1 January onward Myrthe Sassen will be the new coordinator of ARCHON. Myrthe is a former RMA student from the University of Leiden, and will take over from Yannic Rabou who has chosen a new direction in her career. We want to thank Yannic for her commitment and enthusiasm over the past two years, and are looking forward to having Myrthe on board.
TRAVEL TO AND FROM GRONINGEN
In order to facilitate student mobility, ARCHON reimburses up to 60 euros per year (per student) for traveling to and from Groningen for attending educational activities. Travel is only reimbursed for students who send in an evaluation report in order to claim ECTs. Contact our secretary for more information.
ARCHON NEWSLETTER AND MAILINGS
Do you want to stay up to date on ARCHON supported events, funding opportunities and calls for poster/papers/abstracts? Both ARCHON members and non-members can subscribe to out mailinglist. Her you can find the sign up form to the ARCHON mailing list.
MEMBERSHIP
RMA students, PhD students and staff members of the participating institutions can all become members of ARCHON. Membership of ARCHON will give you access to its educational activities, bring you into contact with fellow students and researchers and will provide opportunities to present your work. Read more >>
EVENT FUNDING
Are you a staff member, PhD researcher or RMA student and are you considering organizing an event on your research topic? Did you know that Archon can help you organize and host such events? Read more >>
CONFERENCE SUBSIDY
ARCHON encourages PhD and RMA students to attend and speak at conferences abroad. Therefore we annually award a limited number of conference subsidies to RMA and PhD students for presenting a paper or poster at an international conference. Read more >>
PUBLISH YOUR RESEARCH
ARCHON wants to motivate PhD and RMA students to publish their research! To help you get started, we organize a workshop Publishing for Early Career Researchers, and we have listed a number of online journals that are are open to, or especially meant for, publishing research from Graduate and PhD students. Read more>>
JOBS ETC.
VACANCIES:
The Early Career Archaeologist community created an extensive resource including vacancies, upcoming conferences, data archives and more! More information >>
CONFERENCES:
This index offers an extensive list of upcoming conferences about archaeology. More information >>
PRIZES AND AWARDS:
A number of prizes and awards are available for RMA and PhD students in the Netherlands. We keep track of them in a spreadsheet that you access here.
PHD AND POSTDOC POSITIONS:
Check out Erik Rossenberg’s blog postgraduate opportunities in Archaeology for an up-to-date list of PhD and postdoc positions in archaeology.
John’s Hopkins University has set up a continuously updated repository of federal and private funding opportunities that are intended for postdoctoral investigators. The opportunities are pre-sorted chronologically and alphabetically, and can be searched by funding amount and subject matter.
Arches project (open source software platform) job opportunities.
Fund┋it collects and presents on a single website all research grants and fellowships (post-PhD) available for scholars in the social sciences and humanities in France.
