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Dr. Sofia Laparidou is a secondary teacher working at the Ministry of Education, within the Ministry of Culture, Greece. She is an environmental archaeologist interested in the changing nature of human-environment relationships as shaped by climate, cash cropping, and the expansion of intensive agricultural production into semiarid regions and has used microbotanical analysis to investigate ancient agricultural and pastoral economies. Dr. Laparidou obtained a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Texas; an MSc in GIS at the University οf Greenwich; and an MSc in Environmental Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. She has published her research on the political ecology and microbotanical methods of medieval Jordan in the Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Her paper, entitled “Intensification of production in Medieval Islamic Jordan and its ecological impact: Towns of the Anthropocene,” has been published in The Holocene (2015).

Annette M. Hansen, MSc (Oxon.) is an agricultural and food historian, and ethno-archaeobotanist specializing in the Islamic world. She is a senior archaeobotanist on different archaeological projects in Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Sudan, and is also involved in historical and traditional farming experiments in the Netherlands and Belgium. She is the manager and co-founder of FOST-lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where she is also research associate at the Interdisciplinary Historical Food Studies (FOST) research group. She has published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences and in monographs in Routledge, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, and Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies.

Chiara A. Corbino is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Heritage Science (ISPC-CNR) based in Naples and senior zooarchaeologist of the Pompeii Archaeological Park. Her research is focused on human-animal interactions through time. She investigates animal management and exploitation, ritual activities, biometry, taphonomy and environmental changes. Particular attention is dedicated to the study of human-animal interactions from the Classical period to the Middle Ages in Europe and, since 2005, from the Ayyubid-Crusader to the Ottoman period in the Levant. She cooperates with national and international archaeological teams as senior zooarchaeologist in Italy, England, Greece, Jordan, and Israel.

Georgia Kasapidou (MSc) is a researcher with a focus to archaeobotany. Her dissertation was based on the analysis of plant micro-remains, such as phytoliths and starch grains, from grinding stone tools. She has taken part in various archaeological projects analyzing microbotanical remains from artifacts in prehistoric contexts.