Lamia al Gailani Werris an Iraqi archaeologist living in London. She is an honorary
associate research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. She worked in the Iraq
Museum in the 1960 s, and returned to Baghdad again in 2003 – 04 after the looting to
assist her former colleagues. She is an expert on cylinder seals and has published many
articles on the subject. She also runs the specialist NABU publishers.
Marlies Heinz has been Chair of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Albert Ludwigs-
University, Freiburg, Germany since 1995. Research interests include architecture and
space design; the worlds of power and ideology; materiality and the world behind; and
tradition and change. She has been involved in the excavation of Kamidel-Loz in
Lebanon since 1997.
C.C. Lamberg-Karlovskyis the Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and the past
Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard
University. Over the years he has directed archaeological survey and excavations in
Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Iran. His interests focus upon the
nature and interactions that brought different archaic states into spheres of cultural
interaction.
Jean-Claude Margueronhas been Directeur d’Etudes à l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes since 1985 and has directed excavations at a number of sites including Larsa,
Emar and Ras Shamra. He was the director of the French archaeological Mission to
Mari for twenty seasons from 1979 to 2004 and has published extensively on his work
there. His most recent book on the site is Mari, métropole de l’Euphrate, au IIIe et au
début du IIe millénaire av. J.-C.( 2004 ).
Kathleen McCaffreystudied religion at Claremont Graduate University and ancient
Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Using a synthesist
approach that integrates textual and material evidence with gender theory, she focuses
on intersections of gender and religion in early Mesopotamian culture and on studying
the most curious historical artefact of all, the modern Assyriologist. Her latest
publication, The Female Kings of Ur, examines how twentieth-century gender expec-
tations filtered and framed interpretations of texts and artefacts from the Royal
Cemetery at Ur.
Augusta McMahonis a Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and
History at the University of Cambridge. She has a Ph.D. ( 1993 ) and MA ( 1986 ) from
the University of Chicago and a BA ( 1983 ) from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. She
has participated extensively in archaeological fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and
Yemen, at a range of sites from a Neolithic village through complex urban centres.
Since 2006 , she has been Field Director of the Tell Brak Excavations, Syria. Her
research interests include early urbanism, urban landscapes, prehistoric violent conflict,
and human response to climate change.
Frances Pinnockis Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archeology in the Sapienza
University of Rome, and is the Vice-Director of the Italian Archaeological Expedition
to Ebla. Her main interests are Ebla and the pre-classical cultures of Syria, ancient
–– Contributors ––xvii