Prof. Susan Kane, Director (Oberlin College, Ohio) archaeologist

Professor Kane holds an undergraduate degree from Barnard College and a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in Classical Archaeology. Her major fields of study are Greek, Etruscan, and Roman sculpture and architecture, with a special interest in the archaeometrical study of white marble in the Mediterranean.

A member of the faculty at Oberlin College since 1977, she has excavated in the US, UK, Greece, Yugoslavia, Libya, and Italy.

During the 1970s she excavated at the extra-mural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Cyrene, Libya, with a project directed Professor Donald White (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), and had particular responsibility for the site's statuary.

She currently is the co-director, with Edward Bispham of Oxford University, of the Sangro Valley Project (Abruzzo, Italy) . Over the past five years, she has assembled an international team of interdisciplinary experts to undertake a landscape archaeology study of the middle Sangro River Valley in the Samnite and Roman periods. To enable this work, she was awarded an NSF Major Instrumentation Grant (with Professors S. Wojtal and S. Carrier of Oberlin College) in 2002. She serves as Vice President for Publications for the Archaeological Institute of America, is on the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of Marbles and Other Stones in Antiquity and has published extensively in archaeology and archeometry.

Prof. Donald White (University of Pennsylvania) archaeologist

Specializing in Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, Professor White received his Ph.D. from Princeton and A.B. from Harvard, and was also an Honorary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is a life member of both the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Libyan Studies.

He retired in January 2004 from the University of Pendsylavnia where he served as Chief Curator of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's Mediterranean Section, and as Professor of Classical Archaeology. He previously taught in the University of Michigan's Art History and Classics Departments, and was a Research Curator in the Kelsey Museum.

Professor White carried out fieldwork in Libya from 1964 until 1981, first excavating the port city of Apollonia and subsequently the Extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Cyrene. As a graduate student he excavated for three seasons at Morgantina, an important Greek city in central Sicily, and most recently completed the excavation and publication of Bates's Island, a Late Bronze Age site on the Egyptian coast.

Prof. Samuel Carrier (Oberlin College, Ohio) information technologist

Professor Carrier received his A.B. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Trained as an experimental psychologist, with a specialization in auditory psychophysics, he has been a member of the faculty of Oberlin College since 1970. He served as Oberlin's Provost from 1980 to 1995.

He has served as chief information officer for excavations in Tuscany (at Poggio Colla) and in the Sangro Valley (Abruzzo, Italy): establishing technological infrastructure, developing web sites, and overseeing site documentation.

His primary current research interests are in the nature of archaeological expertise, and in the 3-D visualization of archaeological landscapes and artifacts. He has published archeometric studies with Susan Kane and other scientists.

Dr. Donato Attanasio (ISM-CNR, Roma) archeometrist

Donato Attanasio received his Chemistry degree from Rome University in 1969 and completed his education in the Netherlands (University of Nijmegen, 1974-75) and the United States (University of California at Davis, 1979). At present he works as senior researcher at the Istituto di Struttura della Materia (ISM) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

In recent years his experience in the field of inorganic chemistry, molecular materials, and paramagnetic resonance spectroscopies, has been addressed to the characterization and study of ancient materials. Main research topics are the degradation of modern and antique paper, studies on potteries, and the characterization and provenance of archaeological marbles. An extensive marble database including over 1200 reference samples from the most important historical quarrying sites in the Mediterranean has been established. Novel analytical and statistical procedures have been developed.

Over the years he has been responsible of research groups involved into national and international projects. He has been member of the Institute scientific advisory board and is currently member of the Institute Executive Committee.

Donato Attanasio has published extensively in the fields of chemistry, spectroscopy and archaeometry. His experience in marbles research has been summarized in the recent book Ancient White Marbles: analysis and identification by paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Dr. Joyce Reynolds (Cambridge University) epigrapher