As Associate Professor at the University of Albany, Stuart Swiny teaches the art and archaeology of Cyprus from prehistory to the present; the history of ancient Greece; Islamic art and architecture; and the art and architecture of the ancient world up to the Etruscans. Since excavating in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, his research has focused on the eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus with emphasis on early island colonization, the emergence of complex society, the development of cult and ritual, archaeometallurgy, lithic and ceramic analysis. Swiny also serves as director of the Institute of Cypriot Studies at the University. George Rapp is the Regents Professor Emeritus at University of Minnesota, Duluth, at which he specializes in geoarchaeology. Rapp's interests include archaeological geology, archaeological geology of the eastern Mediterranean region, trace-element fingerprinting of artifacts, and Shang archaeology of China. Rapp also serves as a fellow of the Geological Society of America and charter member of the Society of Professional Archaeologists, the Board of Directors of which he was a member twice. Ellen Herscher has specialized in Cypriot archaeology for forty years, participating in excavations and research at numerous sites throughout the island and living there for a spell. She has published extensively on the Bronze Age and on the preservation of archaeological resources. Herscher is currently a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.