Prof. Dr. Ralf Vandam

Ralf Vandam is landscape archaeologist working on Mediterranean archaeology.

He completed his PhD research (KU Leuven) on the archaeological landscape of the Burdur Plain, SW Turkey in 2014. For this he co-supervised several intensive archaeological surveys of the Sagalassos Project in the vicinity of ancient Hacılar and collaborated with different scholars to reconstruct settlement preferences, resource exploitation strategies and interaction networks through GIS-based spatial and statistical analyses, as well as provenance analyses (i.e. petrology and P-XRF) of the newly collected data.

In the two years thereafter, he was granted a Belgian American Educational Foundation fellowship to work at the Institute of European and Mediterranean Archaeology of SUNY, University at Buffalo, USA, (2014-2015) and a senior fellowship at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations of Koç University, Turkey (2015–2016). During that time he focused on the poorly understood Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age transition in Western Anatolia in relation to early complexity with new provenance analyses.

In 2016 he received a junior postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation- Flanders (FWO) to conduct research at the KU Leuven on marginal landscapes with new archaeological surveys in the Dereköy highlands of the Burdur Province, Turkey. The main of this project is to reconstruct diachronic human-environment interactions in neglected mountainous landscapes and to contrast these outcomes with the developments in the lowlands. In 2019 he secured from the same funding body a senior postdoctoral fellowship to conduct synthetic research on archaeological countrysides. Based on a study of Anatolia, the aim was to develop data integration policies allowing innovative syntheses of currently scattered information. In the same year he was appointed as a part-time lecturer in Archaeology in the Department of Art Studies and Archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Within this framework he initiated a new survey project in the SE Cyprus to shed light on the long-term human and environmental histories in the hinterland of Hala Sultan Tekke.

Since 2022 Ralf Vandam was appointed as a TT-professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). At the VUB he is building up a team to work past human-environment interactions within the Mediterranean and Europe in general. He currently directs the Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland survey and coordinates the Sagalassos Survey in Turkey (in collaboration with the KU Leuven). He chaired the Multidisciplinary Archaeological Research Institute before the merge with AMGC in 2023 and is currently vice-chair of the Art Sciences and Archaeology program at the VUB.

EDUCATION:

• BA in Archaeology, KU Leuven (2008)
• MA in Archaeology, KU Leuven (2009)
•  PhD in Archaeology, KU Leuven (2014)

KEYWORDS:

 Landscape archaeology, human-environment interactions, Field walking, Mediterranean Archaeology, Settlement patterns, Diachronic studies