Dafna Langgut,^1,*,** Yuval Gadot,^1,*** Naomi Poratb,^1,**** Oded Lipschits<sup>1

1</sup>aInstitute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, P.O. Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

^*Corresponding author. Email: langgut@post.tau.ac.il
^**DAFNA LANGGUT received her Ph.D. in archaeology in 2008 from The University of Haifa. She is a researcher at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation dealt with vegetation and climate reconstruction based on fossilised palynomorphes (pollen, spores and dinoflagellates) extracted from eastern Mediterranean marine cores of the last 90,000 years. Recently she completed her postdoctoral research, at the Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University as part of the project, “Reconstructing Ancient (Biblical) Israel: The Exact and Life Sciences Perspective” (funded by the European Research Council). Within this research she studied in high resolution the past vegetation of ancient Israel during the Bronze and Iron Ages and the past relationship between humans and the environment, such as the onset of agriculture, de-forestation and settlement history. Dr Langgut also extracts botanical remains from archeological sites and deals with utilization patterns for living spaces, diet, plant usage, agricultural practices, plant importation, ancient gardens and seasonality of site occupation. In addition, she is also a curator of the Archaeobotany National Collections of Natural History at Tel Aviv University.
^***YUVAL GADOT obtained his Ph.D. in archaeology in 2004 from Tel Aviv University. He is a research associate at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University. Since 2011 Dr Gadot has been the director of a new research project at the Rephaim valley, the bread basket of ancient Jerusalem, designed at reconstructing human strategies for the exploitation of the valley within their historical setting. Dr Gadot is the field director of the Ramat Rahel excavations and the archaeological director of Reconstructing Ancient (Biblical) Israel: The Exact and Life Sciences Perspective, a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). He is also the codirector of the community-based archaeological project at the city of Lod.NAOMI PORAT received her Ph.D. in geoarchaeology from The Hebrew University in 1989. She is a senior research scientist at the Geological Survey of Israel. Her expertise is in luminescence dating and Quaternary geochronology. In 1994 she established the luminescence dating laboratory at the GSI and since then has published a large number of papers in that field.
^****ODED LIPSCHITS obtained his Ph.D. in Jewish History from Tel Aviv University in 1997. He is a Professor of Jewish History at the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, the Director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology and the Head of the “Ancient Israel Studies Program” at Tel Aviv University. Since 2004 he has been the director of the renewed excavations project at Ramat Rahel, Jerusalem, Israel (together with Prof. Manfred Oeming from the University of Heidelberg), and since 2011 he has been the director of the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition (together with Prof. Manfred Oeming and Dr Yuval Gadot). Prof. Lipschits' research focuses on Judah under the rule of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires (see his 2005 book — The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: The History of Judah under Babylonian Rule, Winona Lake), as well as on the administration of Judah during this period (and see his 2011 book together with Prof. David S. Vanderhooft — Yehud Stamp Impressions: A Corpus of Inscribed Stamp Impressions from the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Judah, Winona Lake).