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Dr. Benjamin Dolinka (PhD 2007, Archaeology, University of Liverpool) – formerly Jerusalem District Ceramics Specialist, Israel Antiquities Authority; currently Independent Scholar. Author of Nabataean Aila (Aqaba, Jordan) from a Ceramic Perspective (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2003) and 7 scholarly articles.

Dr. Nicolò Pini (PhD in Classical Archaeology at the University of Cologne, (Germany) is an archaeologist, specialized in ancient urbanism, architecture, and social structures in the Roman and Byzantine periods. Over the last years he has ventured into the Early, Middle, and even Late Islamic periods. He currently conducts a postdoctoral research project at the CReA-Patrimoine, Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), funded by the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (CR - Chargé de recherches). He was previously awarded a COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the same institution. He collaborates on several projects in the Near East, in particular with the Islamic Archaeology Research Unit at the University of Bonn and is also external research associate of the Panorama Platform (based at the Universitè libre de Bruxelles), specialized in acquisition and digitization of objects and architectural surveys.

Prof. Dr. Bethany J. Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto, Islamic art and archaeology) – Co-Director of the Khirbet Beit Mazmīl excavations and Co-PI of the Medieval Jerusalem Hinterland Project. Research Professor of Mamluk Studies and Director of the Research Unit of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn (Germany). Author of Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago, 2011), editor of Reflections of Empire: Archaeological and Ethnographic Studies on the Pottery of the Ottoman Levant (Boston, 2009), and author of 65 scholarly articles. Founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology (Equinox) and Co-editor of Equinox’s Monographs in Islamic Archaeology.

Benyamin Storchan is a PhD candidate of the Department of Bible Studies, Archaeology and the Ancient Near East at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His dissertation, “The Metamorphosis of Holy Land Churches During the Early Islamic Period”, examines the processes of change and continuity as seen from the archaeology of Byzantine churches in the Holy Land during and after the Islamic transition. Storchan completed his MA at Bar Ilan University and BA from Michigan State University. He has been employed at the Israeli Antiquities Authority for over 15 years as a research excavation archaeologist for the Jerusalem Region, and has directed a number of large-scale excavations, including the Glorious Martyr Excavation Project and the Early Bronze Age settlement at Eshta’ol. He has also published a number of final excavation reports and research articles. Storchan is currently a board member for The Israel Archaeological Association, research fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion & Inter-Religious Encounters, and has been recently awarded the David Amit Prize for Archaeological Research and a Humanities Faculty Scholarship from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.