Blog Posts

By: Dominik Hagmann As part of the University of Vienna's course “AI and Interdisciplinary Research” held at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology in the summer term of 2025, students from diverse academic fields participated in a hands-on robotics workshop and explored cutting-edge robotics at General Laser in Vienna. From humanoid robotic agents to agile robot dogs, the hands-on workshop illustrated vividly how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation shape both tomorrow’s industry and future research. Setting the Scene: From Myth to Machine Long before AI emerged as a formal scientific discipline, the idea of creating artificial beings fascinated the human imagination. For instance, Greek mythology introduced automata—self-moving devices—already during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. According to some myths, the smithing god Hephaistos, for example, provided King Alcinoos with “robotic watchdogs” crafted from gold and silver. Furthermore, the deity created Talos, a humanoid “lethal autonomous weapon system” made from bronze, for King Midas to guard the island of Crete. Aside from several further examples, these two cases already comprehensively illustrate how deeply rooted complex visions of intelligent, artificial beings are in human thought. The term robot itself originates from the Czech word robota ("forced labor"), first coined in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), foreseeing a world where artificial workers ultimately rise against their human creators. Today,…

Authors: Thomas Beard, Valentina Laaha, Doris Jetzinger   At the beginning of this year, from the 11th to the 12th of January 2024, the first ‘Geoarchaeology in Vienna’ workshop took place at the University of Vienna, generously funded by HEAS. Born out of the wish to connect and create a nexus between geoarchaeologists based in Vienna, the workshop was conceived and organised by Valentina Laaha, Doris Jetzinger and Thomas Beard, all students within the University of Vienna. The vision for this kickoff-event was to get to know each other, establish connections, and lay the foundation for a network of geoarchaeologists in Vienna. Concerning Geoarchaeology It may have been noticed that, while there are a multitude of institutes of archaeological studies all over Vienna, there is no “Geoarchaeology” department per se. So, what is geoarchaeology then? Every geoarchaeologist has most likely been confronted with this question at some point - by members of the public, colleagues from other disciplines, colleagues from within geoarchaeology, or even by themselves. This may be closely tied to the inherently great diversity within the discipline, including many different specialisations that may, or may not decide to carry the label of 'geoarchaeology'. This often leads to 'missing out on each other' by attending vastly different conferences and different sessions within those conferences, but also being housed in quite diverse…

Blog post by Eve Derenne and Karina Grömer On March 21, 2023, members of two partner institutions from the HEAS network — the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science and the Natural History Museum Vienna — co-organised a workshop titled ‘Interweaving Bell Beaker decorative motifs and textile patterns: Exploring technical and symbolic productions during the third millennium BCE in Europe’. The idea for this workshop emerged in September 2022, when Priv.-Doz. Dr. Karina Grömer (Head of the Prehistory Department at the NHM) and Dr. Eve Derenne (postdoctoral fellow, VIAS) met by chance in Hallstatt during a science communication event, the ‘Archäologie am Berg’ day. The conversation regarding the reconstruction of Bronze and Iron Age textiles shifted to the subject of Bell Beakers, a crucial component of SEASCAPES, the project currently occupying Eve's time in Vienna. The intricate motifs found on both Bell Beaker pottery and anthropomorphic stelae have often been compared to textile patterns, but few if any publications have really substantiated that claim. Several aspects of this topic have also remained unexplored, such as the weaving or fiber working methods used to produce these repeated geometric patterns, and whether these techniques were already established by the third millennium BCE. This lively discussion ultimately resulted in an agreement to hold a workshop that would bring together experts from both fields, with…

For decades, textile remains from archaeological contexts have come more and more into the focus of archaeological research. Recently, the book Ancient Textile Production from an Interdisciplinary Approach: Humanities and Natural Sciences Interwoven for our Understanding of Textiles, edited by Agata Ulanowska, Karina Grömer, Ina Vanden Berghe and Magdalena Öhrmann was published in the Springer’s series “Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology” (2022). It derived from a session held at the European Archaeologists Association Conference in Bern 2019. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-92170-5 The motivation of the book is to improve the understanding of the role of textile production and textile products in the history of humankind. Embedding finds and their context information into socio-economical and cultural discourse contributes to a cultural anthropology of textile use. For the pre- and protohistory periods of Central Europe, it is a challenge that textiles are among those organic materials that are rarely preserved due to the prevailing climatic conditions. A wider goal was to present a comprehensive overview of the latest approaches and aims in archaeological textile research. In the last decades, standards have been set in studies on textile fibres, textile structures, dyes and textile tools. New methods for examining textile artefacts and tools have led to new ways of understanding textile craft in prehistoric and historic times – as well as their impact on economy, trade, social…

The 10th Radiocarbon and Archaeology conference was held at the ETH Zürich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), in parallel with the 24th Radiocarbon conference.   The meeting got underway on Sunday 11/09, with a series of workshops at the Hönggerberg ETH campus, covering topics such as the Carbon cycle, compound-specific radiocarbon dating, mortar dating and also included lab tours of the ETH facilities. This was followed by an ice-breaker event.   The remainder of the conference was held at the main ETH building in central Zurich. Following a welcome from the Rector of the ETH, Prof. Dissertori, Alex Bayliss began the conference by giving an overview of the radiocarbon dating of historic sites in the age of single-year calibration, providing a measure of how far the field of radiocarbon dating and archaeology has come in terms of precision and interdisciplinarity, with dendrochronology and genetics now complementing AMS dating. Aside from two other plenary talks, the remainder of the Archaeology part of the conference was split into two parallel sessions, covering the topics of agriculture/migration/DNA, diet and reservoir effects, archaeological samples for accurate dating, dating at the limit of the method, geoarchaeology, art and cultural heritage and radiocarbon and the protection of cultural heritage. The parallel sessions of the Radiocarbon conference focussed on technical developments and the carbon cycle.   As in…