Lauren RistvetLauren Ristvet is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Robert H. Dyson, Jr, Assistant Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Penn Museum. She has directed archaeological surveys and excavations at major BronzeAge and classical period sites in Syria (Tell Leilan), Azerbaijan (Oğlanqala) and Iraq (Satu Qala). She is the author of In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States (2007), and her articles have been published in journals including Antiquity, the American Journal of Archaeology, BASOR (the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research) and World Archaeology. Read More Read Less