We congratulate our colleague Priv.-Doz. Dr. Andreas G. Heiss on his permanent position as research group leader at the Austrian Academy of Sciences!

After his beginnings as an archaeobotanist at the Institute of Botany in Innsbruck and stations at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU) and at the University of Vienna, Sabine Ladstätter brought him to the OeAW's newly affiliated OeAI in 2016 to strengthen the team of the then newly created Department of Bioarchaeology and to establish an archaeobotany laboratory. The merger of the OeAW institutes OREA, IKAnt and OeAI into the OeAI then resulted in the restructuring of the institute into departments and research groups as of January 2021. Since then, Heiss has been the interim head of the research group »Environment and Human Impact in Historical Societies«, which emerged from the Department of Bioarchaeology, a function he now assumes permanently as group leader.

Andreas G. Heiss and the bioarchaeology team with the fields of archaeozoology, biological anthropology and archaeobotany primarily bring aspects of agricultural, nutritional and health history to the interdisciplinary work of the OeAI. Specialised areas such as culinary science, the mobility of populations, mining research or the history of climate and vegetation are also covered. The research of both historical and prehistoric cultures of Central Europe and the Mediterranean region is the focus. The research group offers in-house expertise in the fields of anthropological and zoological osteology, archaeomalacology and archaeichthyology, palaeopathology and histotaphonomy, domestication and evolutionary research, geometric morphometry (GMM), leather analysis, botanical macroremains analysis, wood/charcoal determination and, in future, palynology.