How this website collects, uses, and protects your personal data.
Last updated: September 13, 2026
An Anthropology of the Material World in Ancient Mesopotamia (“this website,” “we,” “us”) is a research project affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This page explains what personal data we collect when you use this website, why we collect it, and what rights you have over it.
When you submit the contact form on this site, we collect:
We do not use cookies, analytics, or tracking technology on this site beyond what is described here and in the reCAPTCHA note below. We do not sell or rent your data to third parties.
Our contact form is protected by Google reCAPTCHA v3, which helps us block spam and abusive submissions. To do this, reCAPTCHA analyzes technical signals from your browser and connection (such as your IP address and interaction patterns) and shares them with Google for a spam-risk score. This use of reCAPTCHA is subject to Google’s own Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
We collect this data for one purpose: to respond to your inquiry. Your name and email let us reply to you; your message tells us what you’re asking about. The submission date and time is recorded automatically as a standard anti-spam and security measure — it is not used to track or profile you.
Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we process this data on the basis of legitimate interest: responding to messages sent to us is a reasonable and expected use of the information you provide when you choose to contact us.
We retain contact form submissions, including the metadata described above, for 12 months from the date of your message, after which they are deleted from our active inbox.
If you request deletion of your data before then, we remove it from our active inbox within 5 business days of your request. Because our email is hosted by Hostinger, residual copies may persist for a limited period afterward in their backup systems, in line with their standard retention policy — this is outside our direct control, and we are not able to purge third-party backups on demand.
If you are located in the EU/EEA (or another jurisdiction with similar protections), you have the right to:
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at contact@materialworldmesopotamia.org.
Your data is stored only in our email hosting provider’s infrastructure (Hostinger), in the inbox that receives contact form notifications. We do not additionally copy or store your data in any CRM, spreadsheet, third-party marketing tool, or separate database — Elementor’s own submissions-database feature is not enabled on this site, so the email itself is the only copy we hold.
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.
Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to contact@materialworldmesopotamia.org.