We study endomorphism algebras of 2-term silting complexes in derived categories of hereditary finite dimensional algebras, or more generally of $\mathop{\rm Ext}\nolimits$-finite hereditary abelian categories. Module categories of such endomorphism algebras are known to occur as hearts of certain bounded $t$-structures in such derived categories. We show that the algebras occurring are exactly the algebras of small homological dimension, which are algebras characterized by the property that each indecomposable module either has injective dimension at most one, or it has projective dimension at most one.

Fix some typos, to appear in Adv. Math