Dr. Sabina Cveček

Sabina Cveček /tsveh-chek/ is a socio-cultural anthropologist (PhD 2021, University of Vienna) specializing in the interpretation of non-state social organization in eastern Mediterranean prehistory through an interdisciplinary perspective. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Naturall History in New York. 

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Sabina's MSCA project titled “X-KIN: Exploring patterns of prehistoric kinship from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives” addresses questions of i) how can the material structures such as settlements, buildings, artifacts, and biological markers be read as ‘material codes’ of prehistoric kinship and ii) how can ethnographic reports exemplify rather than verify variability in kinship during prehistory. In 2025, Sabina was selected to share her current research within the American Institute of Archaeology National Lecture Program.

 

Sabina uses multiple lines of prehistoric evidence (analyzed by archaeologists) and ethnographic insights (collected by ethnographers) to uncover shared patterns and draw new insights. Since 2016, Sabina has worked alongside prehistoric archaeologists within an interdisciplinary DOC-team research project focusing on households at the dawn of the Bronze Age from anthropological perspectives, funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has gained experience as an archaeological anthropologist, having worked alongside prehistoric archaeologists in the field (Greece, Turkey).

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Sabina is a co-editor (with Barbara Horejs) of Anthroopos special issue The Seasonal and the Material: Anthropology of Seasonal Practices (2024, Anthropos). She is also the author of Çukuriçi Höyük 4: Household Economics in the Early Bronze Age Aegean” (2022, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). This monography bridges archaeological evidence with cross-cultural ethnographic insights into "tribal" social organization. Sabina received Symposia Developement Award (2023) from the Archaeology Division of the American Atnhropological Association, the City of Vienna Award (2023) in the category of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Law, and a Sowi:doc 2021 Award at the University of Vienna for the best PhD thesis.

 

Before moving to Chicago, Sabina was an ATHENS fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Athens, Greece (2021), an IFK_Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, Austria (2020/2021), and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany (2019).

Currently, Sabina is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (since 2022), a co-chair of the Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE) Network of the European Association of Archaeologists (2023-2026), and a Board Member of the Coalition of the Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS) (2025-2029).