Saša Kovačević was born in 1974 in Germany. He completed his primary and secondary education in Croatia and went on to study History and Archaeology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in 1992. He graduated in Archaeology in 2000 upon defending his dissertation “Overview of the archaeological sites and finds of the Martijanec - Kaptol group“ under the mentorship of Dr. Nives Majnarić Pandžić. That same year he became a graduate student of prehistoric archaeology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Since he was a student, he has been participating, as a member of the teams of various institutions, in numerous archaeological rescue and systematic field investigations.
In 2000, he started working at the Institute of Archaeology in Zagreb. He completed his Master’s thesis “Settlement in north-western Croatia during the early Iron Age“ under the mentorship of Dr. Nives Majnarić Pandžić and defended it in 2004. In July 2009 he defended his doctoral dissertation “The Infrastructure of Early iron Age settlements in the Podravina Region“ under the mentorship of Dr. Hrvoje Potrebica. For a number of years, he has been participating in systematic archaeological investigations conducted by the Institute of Archaeology in Zagreb. Together with Dr. Minichreiter, he managed the investigations in Nova Bukovica at Sjenjak, and since 2002 he has been independently managing field investigations of the Late Bronze Age and Late La Tèe settlement at Senjak. In 2007, he conducted the trial excavations at the prehistoric site in Torčec at the position of Međuriče, directing the attention of the expert public once again, after quite a long period of time, to issues of Early Iron Age settlements in the Podravina Region around Koprivnica. Dr. Kovačević’s research is focussed on prehistoric settlements and corresponding finds from habitation contexts, primarily dating from the Early Iron Age in the southern Pannonian region, especially along the Drava river. The main focus is on the appearance and infrastructure of the settlements, their mutual relationships and hierarchy, and on the characteristic mobile finds and culture of everyday life.