Joseph Maran is Professor of pre- and protohistory at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’. His research interests relate to issues of interculturality and changing lifeworlds, relationships between architecture and social practice and between material culture and social memory in societies of the 4th–2nd millennia BC in the eastern Mediterranean. Philipp W. Stockhammer is professor for prehistoric archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and co-director of Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, Jena. His research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounters, human-thing-entanglements, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific interpretation.