Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.

Katharina Rebay-Salisbury

Group Leader

RG »Prehistoric Identities«

Contact

Email: katharina.rebay-salisbury(at)oeaw.ac.at

Telephone: +43 1 51581-6132

Location: Dominikanerbastei 16, 1010 Vienna

Biographical sketch

Prehistoric archaeologist with a research focus on the European Bronze and Iron Ages, leader of the research group »Prehistoric Identities«. After gaining her PhD at the University of Vienna in 2005, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury was a post-doc at the Universities of Cambridge and Leicester in the UK, where she participated in research programmes on the human body and networks, researching the introduction of cremation in Late Bronze Age Europe and Iron Age networks of human representations. Her monograph »The Human Body in Early Iron Age Central Europe« was published with Routledge in 2016. In 2015 she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant for the project »The value of mothers to society« In this project, she investigates social reactions to pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood as well as the relationship between women’s reproductive and social status with an interdisciplinary team. Projects on the study of cremated human remains, gender-specific childhoods as well as mobility and migration round off her portfolio.

2016 she was elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2017, she gained the teaching rights at the University of Vienna for the subject Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology with the Habilitation thesis »Bodies, identities and social relations in Bronze and Iron Age Central Europe«. In February 2023, she was appointed to the professorship of Prehistory of Humanity at the University of Vienna.

Research Projects

• »The Social Status of Motherhood in Bronze Age Europe«
• »The Value of Mothers to Society: Responses to Motherhood and Child Rearing Practices in Prehistoric Europe«
• »Together in Life – Together in Death: Adults and Children in Bronze Age Graves«
• »Unlocking the Secrets of Cremated Human Remains: Temporality, Gendered Mobility and Family Relations in late Bronze Age Austria«
• »Early Bronze Age Burials at Franzhausen«
• »Archaeology at the Danube: Pilot Study Bisamberg«
• »Cremation Bronze Age Burials« 
• »Investigating Sex-Based Differences in Bronze Age Childcare«

Research interests

• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages
• Archaeology of the human body and social identities
• Gender archaeology, archaeology of motherhood, kinship analyses
• Interdisciplinary bioarchaeology (anthropology, DNA, proteomics, isotope analyses)

Publications