Our Team (alphabetically)
Bettina Bernegger
Project Administrator
Bettina Bernegger is a Master’s student of Art History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna where she also completed both of her BA degrees. With this joint background she is particularly interested in questions of materiality, continuity, and cognition spanning from Antiquity up to the present.
Bettina currently works on her master’s thesis in Art History, focused on social agency of materials in Contemporary Art. She recently started her master’s degree in Classical Archaeology where she specializes in Greek Archaeology.
Clara-Maria Hansen
Doctoral Student - Central Mediterranean
Clara-Maria Hansen is a PhD student of the MIGMAG project at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna.
She examines the formation of identity in settlements of Magna Graecia based on foundation myths and their appearance in the archaeological record during the Archaic age.
Clara-Maria completed both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. In her MA thesis, she concentrated on trans-cultural interaction between the Roman and Sasanian Empires via the investigation of entangled iconography. In recent years, she participated in various excavation campaigns, notably in Southern Italy and Jordan.
Eleni Kopanaki
Doctoral Student - Mainland Greece
Eleni Kopanaki is a PhD student of the MIGMAG project at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna.
She investigates multi-scalar mobilities in Mainland Greece and, in particular, their impact on the formation of communities during the Early Iron Age.
She holds an MA in Classical Archaeology from Aarhus University, Denmark. Her thesis examined the construction of cultural identity in the Greek cities of the Black Sea area during the Roman period. Before this, she completed her Bachelor’s in Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Athens, Greece. In the course of her studies, she has participated in several fieldwork projects in Greece and Italy.
Naoíse Mac Sweeney
Principal Investigator
Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Professor of Classical Archaeology (Greek) at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna. She is Academic Editor of the journal Anatolian Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries (UK), and a Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute of America (USA).
She is the Principal Investigator for the MIGMAG project.
Prior to this, she taught at the University of Leicester for ten years. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge; her MA at University College London; and her BA at the University of Cambridge. She has held a Junior Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge; a Research Fellowship at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies; and a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Naoíse research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction in relation to the ancient Greek world.
Tom Maltas
Postdoc - Environmental Archaeology
Tom Maltas is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Archaeology on the MIGMAG project at the Institute for Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna. He investigates evidence for changes in land use and agricultural production strategies that may have accompanied processes of urbanisation and polis formation, and contributes primarily to Work Package 2.
Tom specialises in the archaeobotany of Bronze Age western Anatolia and the Aegean, particularly the roles played by farming in urbanisation and the formation of sustained high levels of wealth inequality. He is also interested in agricultural resilience to climate change in the past. Tom completed his DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford following an MSc and BSc at the University of Sheffield.
He is also conducting archaeobotanical research on a number of projects in western Turkey and the Greek islands.
Jana Mokrišová
Postdoc - Anatolia, and Research Director
Jana is a Postdoctoral Research Associate based at the University of Cambridge, and is leading Work Package 2 for the regions of Ionia and Cilicia, as well as overseeing integration between all four Work Packages.
Jana is an archaeologist specialising in western Anatolia and the eastern Aegean from the Late Bronze Age to the Archaic period and theoretical approaches to ancient mobility. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan, was the John L. Caskey Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and Junior Fellow at the Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul. She has taught at the University of Sheffield and at Birkbeck, University of London.
Her other projects include ‘Project Sideros: Early Iron Technology and Culture History in the Aegean during the Early Iron Age’ (Charles University, Prague). Jana’s primary field research focuses on Turkey and Greece, and she has also conducted fieldwork in Italy, Georgia, and Bulgaria.
Francesco Quondam
Postdoc - Central Mediterranean
Francesco is an archaeologist specializing in peninsular Italy and Sicily from the Bronze Age to the Archaic period. He completed his PhD at the University of Roma “Sapienza” and joined the team in Vienna after three years of post-doctoral research at the University of Basel, focusing on Early Iron Age Calabria (Southern Italy).
His main research interests include early 1st millennium Mediterranean interactions, urbanisation and the rise of complex societies. Francesco has conducted fieldwork in Southern Italy and on the north-eastern slopes of the Palatine hill in Roma. His current field projects include the excavation of the Early Iron Age necropolis at Ponte Rotto in Vulci (Southern Etruria).