Before Michael became a landscape archaeologist, he studied Geography, Geology and Meteorology at the Universities of Stockholm and Freiburg where he obtained a master’s degree (M.Sc.) in 2010 with a thesis about historical land-use and climate change in 17th century China.
After a sojourn at Palermo and Basel he studied Archaeology and Russian literature and finished his M.A. in Prehistoric and Medieval archaeology in March 2018. For his thesis, he set up a predictive model for land-use and settlement opportunities at the Early Medieval settlement-graveyard complex at Lauchheim (southern Germany). From 2018 onwards, Michael published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, participated in a variety of DFG- and Interreg-projects and organized conferences and workshops on archaeological method and theory.
Currently, he is guest-editing a special issue in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (CE-TAG2018, The Production of Space and Landscape). In early 2020, he concluded his PhD thesis (Freiburg, Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Glaser, Multivariate Landscape Affordances in Spatio-Environmental Perspectives) at the Institute of Physical Geography (University of Freiburg).
Michael’s major focus lies on human-environment interactions, digital and spatial modelling, GIS-based environmental analyses and landscape archaeological method and theory. Together with colleagues from Frankfurt, Basel and Krems, he currently works at the comprehensive publication of Neolithic socio-cultural landscape and settlement development in the Carpathian Basin (DFG grant Al 287/10-1, Prof. Dr. Dr. Eszter Bánffy, Prof. Dr. Kurt Alt, Margaux Depaermentier, M.A.). For his second PhD project in Medieval Archaeology (Freiburg, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Brather, 2019-2021, ongoing), he won a grant from the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege in Baden-Württemberg what enables the GIS-based evaluation of internal and external settlement and landscape development of Bissingen an der Teck (southern Germany).