Maria Ivanova-Bieg received her doctorate at the Institute for Prehistory and Early History at Tübingen University with a dissertation on settlement archaeology and fortification architecture in the Aegean-Anatolian region and the Balkans. Then, she worked at the Roman-Germanic Commission of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Frankfurt am Main, at the Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Heidelberg and at the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science at the University of Vienna.
Since 2023, Maria Ivanova-Bieg has been professor of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at the Department of Ancient Studies at JGU. Her research focuses on the intersection between Archaeology, Anthropology and the Sciences. With a methodological focus coming from the Humanities but, above all, the Sciences, she studies material culture in terms of social, cultural and ecological connectivity, focussing on trans-regional, trans-continental developments.
In the last years, she initiated several international research projects, dealing with key topics in Prehistoric Archaeology such as the spread of the earliest agro-pastoral societies, the development of socio-political complexity in the Copper Age of Europe and the emergence of long-range networks in the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions. She integrates methods of bioarchaeology and computational modelling in order to reconstruct the environment, living conditions and life histories of humans, animals and plants in the past. Research projects include isotope analyses of biological remains and studies of biomolecular residues in ceramics from archaeological contexts. At JGU, Maria Ivanova-Bieg intends to continue this line of research together with her colleagues at Mainz and – among other topics – to analyse concepts of sustainable living in remote history that may be a useful complement to current discussions about sustainability and climate change.