About me/Over mij

This is a blog about the research I do. At the moment it's focusing on Bell Beaker settlements and settlement pottery across Europe (between ca 2600-2000 BC). But I worked on many other things in the past, and I'm still working on several other things at the moment.

I studied prehistoric archaeology in Leiden (Bachelor and Research Master focused on Prehistoric Farming Communities) and Sheffield (Erasmus, focusing on pottery analysis, British prehistory and funerary archaeology). After that, I worked at DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services, the Hague) for a year as a project leader on a database of unpublished excavations. Subsequently I worked at the RCE (Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency) for three years as a researcher, focusing on the later prehistory of the Holocene Netherlands. During this time I worked on modelling semantic networks for archaeology, managing the scientific research on three old excavations (Keinsmerbrug, Mienakker and Zeewijk) and stimulating cooperation between municipalities and regional research in the coastal regions of the Netherlands.

When I left the RCE after three years, I founded my own company. This company, MAK Onderzoek & Advies, was hired by the Province of North Holland/Huis van Hilde to study the Bronze Age of Kennemerland as a guide for their collection (published as Kleijne 2015). After this project I managed to secure a position as a PhD candidate in Kiel, Germany. I submitted my PhD thesis in March 2018, defended it in July 2018 and I'm now in the process of publishing it..

I'm currently employed as a Post-Doc within the SFB1266 research programme at Kiel University. My main focus is on Late Neolithic transformations from a pan-European perspective, bringing together the regional research that is done by several subprojects within the SFB programme.

Next to Late Neolithic transformation processes, I'm working on several other things:

- The life and work of Ben Wieland Los jr., a Dutch amateur-archaeologist active between the 1950s-1970s.

- The role of marine fishing in the prehistory of NW Europe..

- The coastal dune landscape of the Low Countries and its prehistoric habitation (Middle Neolithic until the Roman occupation).
As part of this side project I'm currently publishing old excavations, obtaining new 14C dates, making Bayesian models and acquiring funding for more analyses on old finds.

- The excavation history of an enigmatic megalith in Western Poland, near Kuznica Zelichowska

- The semantics and typologies behind prehistoric artefacts

- Determining prehistoric artefacts from excavations (pottery, stone, metal, glass).