In the more than six years since we started this project, we have incurred many debts both great and small. Thanks goes first of all to our contributors for their hard work (and, in some cases, considerable patience). We are also grateful for the feedback from the reviewers of our initial proposal to Wiley and the many reviewers of individual chapters who must remain anonymous. At Iowa State University, David wishes to thank Michael Bailey, Simon Cordery, Rachel Meyers, John Monroe, Margaret Mook, Pamela Riney‐Kehrberg, Jennifer Rivera, and Tao Wang. At St. Olaf, Tim thanks Nancy Hollinger, Gabrielle Lattery, and Robert Entenmann. We also thank Sabine Huebner, Jinyu Liu, Jennifer Loullier, Nick Nicastro, Jim and Ed Shaughnessy, and Warren Stine for assistance with various matters. Thanks, finally, to everyone at Wiley.

Smaranda Andrews earned an MA in Archaeology from the University of Constanta and a PhD in Agricultural History and Rural Studies from Iowa State University‚ where she now is a Lecturer in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. She has conducted archaeological research in Romania on Neolithic, Greek, and Roman sites. She is also a certified organic inspector, Produce Safety Lead Trainer, and has worked as an agricultural consultant in Romania, the United States, and the Philippines.

Katherine Beydler is a PhD Candidate in Classical Philology at the University of Michigan. She received a BS in Plant Biology and a BA in Classical Languages from the University of Iowa in 2014. Her main interests are the environmental and agricultural history of central Italy from both archaeological and textual perspectives. Her dissertation examines Roman literary accounts of early agriculture and landscape development in combination with archaeobotanical evidence. During the summer, she works as the Environmental Lab Supervisor at the Gabii Project.

Christophe Chandezon is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Montpellier (France). He works on Greek agrarian economy, especially on animal husbandry. He is also interested in various aspects of the relations between humans and domestic animals in ancient Greece. He is the author of L'élevage en Grèce (fin Ve‐fin Ier s. a.C.). L'apport des sources épigraphiques (Bordeaux 2003). Currently, he is editing books on Artemidorus of Daldis and dream interpretation in the Classical world (recently: Artémidore de Daldis et l'interprétation des rêves. Quatorze études, Paris, 2014, coedited with J. du Bouchet).

Michael J. Decker is Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida and Chair of the Department of History. He earned his DPhil from the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford University. Decker’s research interests include the medieval Mediterranean and Anatolia, specifically the social, environmental, and economic history as well as the material culture of the East Roman Empire. His current research includes work on the landscape and culture of the East Roman Empire during the seventh–ninth centuries CE and the Medieval Coinage and Economy Project Database. He is editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Byzantine Archaeology. His past fieldwork includes field survey and excavation in Syria and Jordan. He currently works on the Realmonte Roman villa excavation, as well as 3D digitization and virtualization projects in Sicily.

Phillip C. Edwards teaches at La Trobe University in Australia. His interests include the origins of farming and the first villages in the Levant. For over 35 years he has specialized in the archaeology of the east Jordan Valley, where he has excavated sites spanning the period between 500 000 and 9000 years ago. His current research is focused on the Neolithic site of Zahrat adh‐Dhra‘ 2 in Jordan, with the aid of a White‐Levy publication grant. He also directs the “Ice Age Villagers of the Levant” project, which investigates how Natufian communities settled in the first villages.

Andrew S. Fairbairn is Associate Professor and Head of Archaeology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He is an archaeobotanist and archaeologist interested in ancient agriculture, foraging practice, and past anthropogenic landscape change. He has worked in Turkey since 1999, publishing research on past farming practice and economic change in a range of sites including Neolithic Çatalhöyük East, Pınarbaşı, Canhasan III, and Boncüklu, where he is the project co‐director, as well as Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Medieval occupation at Kaman Kalehöyük, Büklükale, Yassihöyük, Kültepe, and Kinet Höyük. He has also published research on sites in the United Kingdom, central Europe, Jordan, Papua New Guinea, and Australia and is Associate Editor for the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.

Alan Farahani is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His primary research interests are in the anthropological archaeology of southwest Asia and Eurasia more broadly, socio‐ecological approaches to the human past, and the trajectories of agriculture worldwide throughout the Holocene. He has conducted archaeological field research or published on sites in Armenia, El Salvador, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, the Philippines, Spain, and Tunisia.

Alain Ferdière is a French archaeologist mainly working on the Gallo‐Roman country and agropastoral economy, but he has recently led a project (survey and excavation) on the little Roman city of Javols‐Anderitium in South France. He was Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology in the University of Tours. In a big bibliography about the archaeology of Roman Gaul, we can note here Les campagnes gallo‐romaines (2 vol., 1988) and the chapter “L’époque romaine,” in A. Ferdière et al. (eds.), Histoire de l’agriculture en France de la Protohistoire au Haut Moyen Âge (2006).

Brendan Haug is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Archivist of the Papyrology Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He earned his degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. He writes on aspects of agriculture and irrigation in Greek, Roman, and early Islamic Egypt and is preparing a monograph on the environmental history of Egypt's Fayyum.

David B. Hollander is Professor of History at Iowa State University. His main interest is the economic history of the late Republic and early Empire. He is the author of Money in the Late Roman Republic (2007) and Farmers and Agriculture in the Roman Economy (2018). He edited The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities (2019, with Thomas R. Blanton IV and John T. Fitzgerald). He also serves as an editor for Wiley’s Encyclopedia of Ancient History.

Timothy Howe is Professor of History, Archaeology & Ancient Studies at St. Olaf College. His main interests include Greek and Roman agriculture and warfare, Mediterranean archaeology, and the historiography of Alexander the Great. He is the author of Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and Society in Ancient Greece (2008) and also serves as associate field director of the Hellenistic/Roman archaeological site of Antiochia ad Cragum in Southern Turkey.

M. Eleanor Irwin retired in 2001 from the University of Toronto Scarborough where she was a member of faculty since 1968. She now lives in Haliburton, where she grows vegetables with some success. Her main research interest concerns plants in the Greek and Roman world. She contributed “Greek and Roman botany” to A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, Georgia L. Irby, ed. Wiley Blackwell 2016. Her next project is searching for evidence of climate change in the Roman agricultural writers. Her other research interest is in the history of Classical scholarship; she contributed a chapter on Kathleen Freeman to Unsealing the Fountain: Women Classical Scholars from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall. eds. Oxford. 2016). She is presently writing entries for a projected Dictionary of Women Classicists, edited by Judith Hallett and Graham Whitaker.

Valasia Isaakidou is a zooarchaeologist and Aegean prehistorian. She is the co‐editor of Escaping the Labyrinth: The Cretan Neolithic in Context (2008) and co‐author (with Paul Halstead) of “Sheep, sacrifices, and symbols: animals in Later Bronze Age Greece” for The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology (2017).

Michael Jursa is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Vienna and member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In his principal field of research, Babylonian social and economic history, he has authored numerous papers and several monographs, including Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (Münster 2010), Neo‐Babylonian Letters and Contracts from the Eanna Archive (with Eckart Frahm, New Haven 2011), and Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume 4 (with Ira Spar, New York 2014).

Jens Kamlah holds the Chair of Biblical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen, and he serves as Director of Tübingen’s Institute of Biblical Archaeology. His research field is the archaeology and history of Ancient Palestine, including the Central Levant (i.e. Lebanon) and the Southern Levant (i.e. Israel, Palestinian territories, Jordan, and the Sinai peninsula), from the end of the Stone Ages until Medieval Times. He is especially interested in the Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement and landscape history, as well as in the historical research regarding Old Testament texts. His current research projects encompass the ongoing excavations at Tell el‐Burak (Lebanon; together with Hélène Sader and Aaron Schmitt) and the Atlas of Agriculture of Ancient Palestine (together with Simone Riehl and with Britt Starkovich). Both projects are based on systematically combined analyses of archaeological and historical research together with zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical approaches.

Dennis Kehoe is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Tulane University, where he was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities 2010–2013. His scholarship focuses on the Roman economy and Roman law, particularly on the relationship between law and the economy of the Roman Empire. His principal publications include The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy (Ann Arbor 1997) and Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor 2007). He is also a contributing editor and translator in B. W. Frier. ed., The Codex of Justinian (Cambridge 2016).

Ravi Korisettar is currently UGC Emeritus and Fellow at the Department of History and Archaeology, Karnatak University, Dharwad, India. His discovery of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT), volcanic ash of Sumatra origin in peninsular river deposits has proved significant for dating the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and has brought the Indian subcontinent at the forefront of debate on the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. He is co‐editor of Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology of India (Geological Society of India 1995), The Rise of Early Human Behaviour in Global Context (Routledge 1998), Indian Archaeology in Retrospect (ICHR and Manohar [4 volumes], 2001/2), and a special issue of Quaternary International (vol. 258, 2011) and editor of Beyond Stone and More Stones (Vo. 1: 2017 and Vol. 2: 2018).

Michael Kozuh is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University. He researches the ancient Near East, focusing on the history, agriculture, administration, and technology of Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE. He is particularly interested in how cuneiform administrative texts attempt both to create and capture the reality of agricultural operations over time. He is the author of The Sacrificial Economy: Assessors, Contractors, and Thieves in the Management of Sacrificial Sheep at the Eanna Temple of Uruk (ca. 625–520 BC) (Eisenbrauns 2014), which examines the management of 60 000 sheep under the control of a temple in southern Babylonia. His next project is a social history of the Mesopotamian plow team.

Lynne A. Kvapil is Assistant Professor of Classics at Butler University. She earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2012. Her research is in Mycenaean archaeology with a focus on farming and field systems, ceramic production, and mortuary practices. She has worked on numerous archaeological projects, including the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) and the Petsas House excavations at Mycenae. She is currently the assistant director and field supervisor for the Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage, and explOration Synergasia (TAPHOS).

Benedict Lowe is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Alabama. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1997. Dr. Lowe is a specialist in the economy of the Roman World focusing in particular on the Iberian Peninsula and its relationship to the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds. He is the author of Roman Iberia: Economy, Society and Culture (Duckworth, 2009) and has two forthcoming books: Cádiz: a History (Routledge) and The Greeks in the Far West (edited with Jens Krasilnikoff) (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Michael MacKinnon is Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg. He received his BSc (Biology) and MA (Anthropology) from the University of Toronto, and MA and PhD (Anthropology) from the University of Alberta. As an archaeologist he has worked at more than 60 sites throughout the Mediterranean, including projects in an array of countries and regions – Italy, Sicily, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Turkey, Romania, Portugal, Spain, Egypt, and Tunisia. His particular interests focus on the role of animals within ancient Greek and Roman societies, as drawn from interdisciplinary exploration of zooarchaeological, ancient textual, and iconographical evidence. He is the author of Production and Consumption of Animals in Roman Italy: Integrating the Zooarchaeological and Textual Evidence (2004).

Rachel Mairs is Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Reading. She has previously held positions at New York University, the University of Oxford, and Brown University. She is the author of The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014), Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters: Exploring Egypt and the Near East in the Late 19th‐Early 20th Centuries (with Maya Muratov 2015) and From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and his Clients (1885–1933) (2016).

J.G. Manning took his AM and a PhD from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. At Yale he is the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Professor of History and of Classics, with appointments also in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and at Yale Law School. He is co‐Director of Archaia – the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antiquity and the Premodern World (http://archaia.yale.edu/) Current projects include the modeling of Egyptian history using cultural evolutionary theory, among other approaches, for the Seshat Project (http://seshatdatabank.info/), the history of property in the context of ancient law, a history of the Hellenistic world, and a major new project exploring and specifying the underlying links between short‐term climate change, war, rebellion, and economic performance in the Hellenistic world.

Annalisa Marzano obtained her PhD in 2004 from Columbia University and is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She has published on a wide range of topics related to Roman social and economic history. She is the author of Roman Villas in Central Italy. A Social and Economic History (2007) and Harvesting the Sea: The Exploitation of Marine Resources in the Roman Mediterranean (2013), and co‐editor of The Roman Villa in the Mediterranean Basin: Late Republic to Late Antiquity (2018).

Juan Carlos Moreno García is a CNRS senior researcher at the University of Paris IV‐Sorbonne. He has published extensively on pharaonic administration, socioeconomic history, and landscape organization, usually in a comparative perspective with other civilizations of the ancient world, and has organized several conferences on these topics. Recent publications include Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East, 1300–500 BC (2016) and Ancient Egyptian Administration (2013). He is also chief editor of The Journal of Egyptian History (Brill), area editor (“economy”) of the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, and co‐editor of the series Elements: Ancient Egypt in Context (Cambridge University Press).

Laura Motta is a Research Specialist in Archaeobotany at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. She earned her PhD at University of Cambridge in 2011. Her research focuses on people–environment interactions in later prehistory and early historical periods, and she is particularly interested in the investigation of social complexity in early cities through food redistribution patterns, agricultural practices, and landscape modifications. She has more than 30 years of fieldwork experience, and she is currently involved in research projects in Italy, Romania, and Egypt, including the excavations at Gabii and at Sant’Omobono (Rome).

Clémence Pagnoux is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). She completed her PhD at the University Paris 1 Panthéon‐Sorbonne (France) on fruit tree cultivation in prehistoric and ancient Greece. Her current research focuses on agriculture and domestication of plants in Central and Eastern Mediterranean during prehistory and antiquity, through combined analyses of ancient written sources (Greek and Latin) and archaeobotanical data.

Simone Riehl

Pamela Riney‐Kehrberg is Professor of History at Iowa State University. She is the author of Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas (1994), Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest (2005), Always Plenty to Do: Growing Up on a Farm in the Long Ago (2011), and The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 (2014). She is also the editor of the Routledge History of Rural America. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society. Currently, she is researching the Farm Crisis of the 1980s.

Saskia Roselaar holds a PhD from Leiden University (2009). She has worked as a Newton International Fellow at the University of Manchester and as a Nottingham Advanced Research Fellow. Her 2010 book Public land in the Roman Republic: A Social and Economic History of Ager Publicus in Italy, 396–89 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press) was awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize and the Premio Speciale della Corte Costituzionale della Repubblica italiana. Her research interests are the social, economic, and legal history of the Roman Republic, as well as issues of citizenship and integration in the Roman world in general.

Turan Takaoğlu received his PhD in archaeology from Boston University in 2000. He is currently Professor of Aegean and Anatolian Archaeology at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey. He excavated the prehistoric settlement at Gülpınar (Smintheion) in the coastal Troad between 2004 and 2014. He is currently investigating the Iron Age cemetery on the island of Tenedos. His research focuses on production and exchange systems, technological organization, and ethnoarchaeology. He edited four volumes of books entitled Ethnoarchaeological Investigations in Rural Anatolia between 2004 and 2007.

D. Alex Walthall is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his PhD from Princeton University in 2013. Alex specializes in the material culture of the Hellenistic Mediterranean and in the archaeology of ancient Sicily. Since 2013, Alex has directed the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP), a long‐term research and excavation project at the archaeological site of Morgantina in central Sicily. He has published articles in multiple journals, including Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, American Journal of Numismatics, and Fasti On Line Documents & Research, on topics ranging from Classical Greek coinage to the agricultural administration of Hellenistic kingdoms.

Yijie Zhuang is a senior lecturer in Chinese Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2013. His main research interests are water management histories and agricultural ecologies and how these were related to social evolution in the ancient worlds. He has conducted fieldwork in China, India, Cambodia, and Madagascar. His recent edited volume is on Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present (2018, open access).

Julien Zurbach is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek history at the ENS, Paris, affiliated to UMR 8546 Aoroc and a member of the IUF. His areas of specialization are early Greek economic and social history, and Mycenaean epigraphy and archaeology. He has conducted field projects in Kirrha (Phocis) and Miletus (Ionia). Recent publications include an edited volume, La main d'oeuvre agricole en Méditerranée archaïque (Bordeaux 2015), and a study of land allocation and exploitation, Les hommes, la terre et la dette en Grèce, ca 1400–ca 500 aC (Bordeaux 2017).