Stone Age Archaeology

Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM) Members

Caroline POSCH

Caroline Posch is a post-doctoral researcher and curator of the Stone Age Collection at the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHMW). She is specialised on the material culture and settlement strategies of the Alpine Mesolithic, with focus on landscape usage, raw material procurement strategies and lithic technology. Since 2022 she is a staff member of the NHMW. In her work, she focusses on the one hand on the curational practice as well as the scientific evaluation and study of various artefact types from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Early Neolithic, including objects such as the Venus of Willendorf. One the other hand she is involved in several research projects centred on the first use and settlement of the Austrian Alps during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.    

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The Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) Members

Viola SCHMID

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Quaternary Archaeology at the Department of Prehistory & West Asian/Northeast African Archaeology of the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since my master’s, I focus on lithic technological developments in the southern African Stone Age. In 2019, I finished my PhD on the C-A layers of Sibhudu Cave (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) in the light of the MSA lithic technologies in MIS 5 with "magna cum laude" in a joint doctoral programme at the Universities of Tübingen and Paris Nanterre. I started my Hertha Firnberg project ‘Time of essential changes in human history (TECH)’ in October 2022. The project concerns the analysis of lithic assemblages from three quasi-synchronous sites, Sibhudu Cave, Bushman Rock Shelter, and Rose Cottage Cave, in different biomes of South Africa. My aim is to gain a better understanding of the lithic technology, innovativeness and connectedness of past societies in South Africa during Marine Isotope Stage 5.    

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