Dafna Langgut,^1,*,** Eli Yannai,^2,*** Itamar Taxel,^1,**** Amotz Agnon,^3,***** Shmuel Marco<sup>4,******

1</sup>aThe Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
²bIsrael Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem, Israel
³cThe Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
⁴dThe Department of Geosciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

^*Corresponding author. Email: langgut@post.tau.ac.il
^**Dafna Langgut received her PhD in archaeology in 2008 from Haifa University, Israel. She is the director of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Ancient Environments at the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. Her expertise is in Quaternary palynology and paleoecology. Dafna also extracts archaeobotanical remains (i.e. pollen, wood and charcoal) from archaeological sites, and is the curator of the pollen and archaeobotanical collections of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University.
^***Eli Yannai works for the Israel Antiquities Authority where he is the senior excavator at the excavations survey and research department. Eli received his PhD. from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1996. His main archaeological excavations are at Ein Asawir, Bet Dagan, Lod, Yavneh, Mishmar Dawid and Natzur.
^****Itamar Taxel received his PhD in archaeology from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 2011. He is currently the codirector of the Yavneh-Yam Excavation Project and the Yavneh Regional Survey Project, and he is also a research associate at the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures of Tel Aviv University. Itamar specialises in Roman, Byzantine and Islamic archaeology in Israel and the southern Levant, and has participated in the publication of numerous excavations, including the Israel Antiquity Authority excavations at Yavneh.
^*****Amotz Agnon studies dynamic processes of geology such as earthquakes, volcanoes and sea level changes, and their destructive impacts. Following research on regional tectonics, he now principally focuses on destruction layers in the Levant. His PhD research at the University of California, Berkeley (1988) addressed the thermo-elasticity of the Earth's mantle with implications for seismic tomography.
^******Shmuel Marco received his PhD from the Hebrew University in Israel. He is currently Professor of geology at Tel Aviv University. His research topics include palaeoseismology, earthquake effects on archaeological structures and natural sediments, soft sediment deformation, and the secular variation of the geomagnetic field.