I am a microarchaeologist researching the sedimentary archaeological record.

Sediments present the context and the main part of the archaeological record. They preserve information about past environments, human behavior and site formation. Thus they present a unique window into the past and human-environment relationship that I explore via a microcontextual approach. In this approach, I contextualize geoscientific techniques on a microscopic scale using micromorphology to extract behavioural information, paleoenvironmental signals and to assess the integrity and completeness of the archaeological record. My work concentrates on three research areas: site formation and depositional enviroments, pyroarchaeology, and environmental archaeogenetics.

I studied Prehistory, Palaeoanthropology and Soil Science at Hamburg and Tübingen University and completed my doctoral studies at Tübingen University in 2014 at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences. Afterwards, I first held a 2-year IRC post-doctoral fellowship at the University College Dublin and continued on as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Since 2022 I am situated at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna. I am the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant MicroStratDNA.