About the authors:
Conrad Schmidt is a research fellow within the framework of his own German Research Foundation (DFG) project at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IANES) of the University of Tübingen. The focus of his work is the socio-economic development and the material culture of the Ancient Near East in the Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC). Conrad studied Near Eastern Archaeology and the Philology of the Ancient Near East at the universities of Leipzig, Halle-Wittenberg, London (UCL and SOAS) and Tübingen. He wrote his PhD thesis on the Early and Middle Bronze Age pottery of Tell Mozan, Syria (2007, summa cum laude). Afterwards he held a full-time position in the Qatna project of the University of Tübingen. Conrad has conducted various archaeological research projects in the Sultanate of Oman since 2010.
Stephanie Döpper is research fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt with a Feodor Lynen return fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. Her research focus lies on the reuse of Bronze Age tombs in Eastern Arabia as well as the material culture of the Early Bronze Age in the region. Stephanie studied Near Eastern Archaeology at the universities of Tübingen and Cambridge and gained her Magister (2011) and PhD (2015, summa cum laude) at the University of Tübingen. Her PhD thesis was about the Late Bronze Age pottery of the Royal Palace of Qatna, Syria. She spent her first post-doc at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University, the Netherlands. Since 2010 Stephanie has conducted archaeological fieldwork in the Sultanate of Oman. Besides her work in Oman, she participated in excavations in Syria, Malaysia and Germany.