Dr. Lasse van den Dikkenberg

Lasse van den Dikkenberg was born in Zeist in 1993. In 2016 he completed his bachelor’s degree with a thesis on the reuse of urnfields in the southern Netherlands. He completed his Research Master’s thesis cum laude under the supervision of Prof. Dr. David Fontijn, analysing Middle Iron Age burial rituals in the southern Netherlands, Flanders, and the German Rhineland. From 2020-2021 he worked on the Neolithic excavations in Angeren under the ADC (through ALEF Groep). He was a researcher in the Chariots on Fire project, headed by Prof. Dr. Nico Roymans, which led to a co-authored book chapter in the Chariots on Fire, Reins of Power volume (2024).

In 2021 he started his PhD trajectory as part of the Putting Life into Late Neolithic Houses project, headed by Prof. Dr. Annelou van Gijn. In the same year he joined the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Leiden student journal Inter-Section, serving as editor-in-chief in 2023–2024. In 2022 he joined the ARCHON Steering Committee, and he became involved in a research project of the municipality of The Hague on food and subsistence strategies in the Neolithic. This resulted in a joint report with specialists from the municipality, commercial companies, and Leiden University.

In 2023 he co-organised the ARCHON Summer School for Experimental Archaeology, supported by an ARCHON event subsidy, for which he was a co-applicant. In 2024 he spent one month as a guest researcher at the University of York, analysing Neolithic stone tools from the Ness of Brodgar excavations in close collaboration with Dr. Aimée Little and Prof. Dr. Mark Edmonds. Later that year he worked for six months on the EXALT project, which led to a joint publication in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology together with Dr. Alex Brandsen.

During his PhD trajectory he was involved in teaching several BA and MSc courses on material culture studies and experimental archaeology, and he co-supervised MSc theses on microwear analysis and Vlaardingen Culture topics. He also worked as a microwear specialist in commercial projects, analysing flint tools from Mesolithic and Neolithic excavations in the Netherlands.