[1][2] Since July 2015, he has been Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Van Dommelen was born in the Netherlands and took part in his first excavation while in high school.
A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia".
[4] From 1993 to 1997, during his doctoral studies, van Dommelen was a graduate research assistant in the Department of Archaeology at Leiden University.
[1][2] In July 2015, he was appointed Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown, stepping down from that role in 2023.