The research group Archaeology is a very active player in scientific research, which is driven by various internal research units. The main five units are (1) Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology of NW Europe, (2) Mediterranean Archaeology, (3) Historical Archaeology of NW Europe, (4) Near Eastern Archaeology and Assyriology and (5) Archaeometry and Natural Sciences.
These units operate with mutual interaction and through partnerships with other research teams of the faculty or the university. The research production is diverse, original and innovative and is highly visible in the international scientific community, in part by the many successful methodological contributions to the discipline, a large number of publications and the organization of numerous scientific meetings. This research is regularly published in international journals and the broad geographical and thematic coverage of the department’s fieldwork projects leads to a significant impact on the international research community.
The reputation of the various teams in the field of landscape and settlement archaeology, through the development of major field projects with a wide geographical spread across NW Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia, is particularly strong. Among the notable methodological achievements we mention the development of cutting-edge technology in the field of archaeological aerial photography and remote sensing, geophysical prospections, non-invasive survey methods, geoarchaeological field work and GIS-based analyses. Often associated with the field work, there are many interdisciplinary studies and archaeometrical analyses of archaeological (and ancient artistic) objects. Especially in the field of ceramic studies in a broad sense the department takes a pioneer position. Several projects related to historical periods combine the intensive study of the material culture with the extraction of data from historical documents and texts.