Christopher P. Thorntonis a Consulting Scholar of the Asian Section of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum, where he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology in
2009. He has published a number of papers on early metallurgy and on the late
prehistory of Oman, Iran, and Southern Turkmenistan. He is currently director of the
Bronze Age site of Bat in northern Oman, where he has been excavating since 2007.Jason Uris the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the
Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specialises in early urbanism
and landscape archaeology and has conducted field surveys in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and
Iran. He is the author of Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The
Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999 – 2001 ( 2010 ). He is currently preparing a history of
Mesopotamian urbanism.Marc Van De Mieroopis Professor of History at Columbia University in New York.
He has also taught at the University of Oxford and at Yale University, and has authored
numerous books and articles on the histories of the Ancient Near East and Egypt.
Helga Vogelis assistant professor at the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at the
Free University Berlin. Her research interests include mortuary practices, state
formation, and gender archaeology. She specialises in the visual cultures of the ancient
Near East and has published articles on topics ranging from women’s history in
Mesopotamia to visual culture and politics in the ancient Near East.
Joan Goodnick Westenholzis Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study
of the Ancient World at New York University. She has served as Chief Curator at the
Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem from 1988 to 2008 and as Senior Research Associate
on the Assyrian Dictionary Project of the Oriental Institute at the University of
Chicago. She has published extensively on ancient Mesopotamian studies, especially
on Babylonian religion and literature. Her special research interests are Mesopotamian
theological conceptions, Akkadian heroic traditions and the conceptualisation of the
female role in Mesopotamian society as well as lexicographical research.
Magnus Widellis Lecturer in Assyriology in the Department of Archaeology, Classics
and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the history,
languages and texts of ancient Mesopotamia, and he is particularly interested in the
Sumerian material and in socio-economic, cultural, environmental and agricultural
issues of the third millennium BC.Tony J. Wilkinson is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham
University, UK. Having trained as a geographer, he moved into archaeology where he
worked on regional landscape projects in the UK and the Middle East. He was formerly
Assistant Director of the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq, in Baghdad,
Research Associate (Associate Professor) at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago,
and Lecturer and Professor in the Department of Archaeology, University of Edinburgh,
and he is a Fellow of the British Academy. His book, Archaeological Landscapes of the
Near East,received the Book Prize of the Society for American Archaeology ( 2004 ) and
the Wiseman Book Award of the Archaeological Institute of America ( 2005 ).
–– Contributors ––xix