Jurg Eggler Author

Burton MacDonald is Senior Research Professor, Department of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Since 1970, he has carried out archaeological work in Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. He began his archaeological survey work in Jordan in 1979 and has directed and previously published on four projects; The Wadi al-Hasa Archaeological Survey’ (1979-1983), The Southern Ghors and Northeast 'Arabah Archaeological Survey’ (1985-1986), The Tafila-Busayra Archaeological Survey (1999-2001), and The Ayl to Ras an-Naqab Archaeological Survey (2005-2007).

Larry G. Herr is professor at Burman University, Lacombe, Alberta, Canada. He has done archaeological work in the Near East for the past four decades. He is associate director of the Madaba Plains Project's excavations at Tall al-'Umayri, Jordan, and a past associate editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

D. Scott Quaintance is a computer specialist with degrees in linguistics and computer sciences and mathematics from Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS. He served as administrator of the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR), Amman, between 1991 and 1993 and prior to his work on both The Tafila-Busayra Archaeological Survey, West-Central Jordan (1999-2001) and the present project, he was administrator of ACOR's  Petra Church Project.

Geoffrey A. Clark is a former Regents' Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University. He is a paleoanthropologist and the author, co-author or editor of over 250 articles, notes, reviews and comments, and 12 monographs and books on human biological and cultural evolution in 'deep time' - the past four million years. His current interests turn on the logic of inference underlying knowledge claims in the various aspects of modern human origins research and with applications of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in archaeology. He has done fieldwork in Arizona, Mexico, France, Spain, Cyprus, Turkey and Jordan. Other research foci include European Mesolithic forager adaptations and the peopling of the Americas.

Hani Hayajneh is a professor in the faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan. As a member of that faculty he specializes in Near Eastern Civilizations and Languages. He has published a number of research papers, books, articles and reviews on the languages and cultural history of the Levant and Arabia. He has represented Jordan on cultural heritage issues in several international venues, notably the Intergovernmental Committee of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Jurg Eggler studied Theology, Semitic Languages and Cultural History, and ancient Near Eastern iconography at Bogenhofen (Austria), Helderberg and Stellenbosch (South Africa), and Fribourg (Switzerland). Since 1998 he has been a research fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Fribourg. He co-directed the publication of the corpus of seal-amulets from Jordan, is editor-in-chief of the lexicon on the Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East, and is currently preparing a comprehensive reference work on the iconography of animals in Palestine/Israel and Jordan.