Program in Early Cultures

Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. He concentrates on later Mediterranean prehistory and the earlier part of Classical Antiquity - roughly the first millennium BCE – but comparative studies of ethnographic and recent historical context in the Mediterranean and elsewhere play a crucial role in his research and teaching.

He read Archaeology and Classics at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands), specializing in Theoretical and Classical Archaeology (MA, 1990; PhD, 1998); he also studied Anthropology and Material Culture at UCL (1991). He taught Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Glasgow between 1997 and 2012, before coming to Brown University. He serves as director of the Joukowsky Institute since 2015. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Valencia (Spain, 2005-06), Cagliari (Sardinia, 2011) and the Balearics (Mallorca, 2012).