Kristina A Franke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Institute of Archaeological Sciences, and an associate of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum and the University of New England, Australia. She received her doctorate in archaeology and archaeometallurgy at UCL, London, having studied Near Eastern Archaeology, Semitic Languages, and Prehistory and Early History at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, München and The Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials at UCL, London.She took part in excavations and surveys in Anatolia, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Germany. Her current research focuses on ancient metallurgy in Iran as part of the Mining Regions of the Central Plateau project, which is part of the DFG Priority Programme 2176 The Iranian Highlands. Her major interests are pyrotechnologies and production processes, modes and patterns of exchange, the significance of craft in ancient societies and methods in archaeometry. Her research focuses predominantly on ancient south-west Asia.ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2397-1462 Thomas Stöllner holds the Chair for Pre- and Protohistory at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and directs the Research Department and the Department of Mining Archaeology at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum (DBM). His main area of research is the social and economic development of mining communities throughout pre- and protohistory with a focus on mining, the archaeometry of mining, and the archaeology of technology and social interrelations with the aid of studies in settlements and graveyards.His research spans from Old World archaeology, including Central and Eastern Europe, to the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Central Asia, as well as South America.ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8681-3632 Nima Nezafati studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Shahid Beheshti and the Research Institute for Earth Sciences in Tehran, as well as mineralogy at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. He received his doctorate from the Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen on the Deh Hossein ore deposit. He has been Deputy Head of the Archaeometallurgy Research Department at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum since the end of 2020, while he has been appointed as Honorary Professor at Ruhr University Bochum since 2023.He specialises in the deposits of Iran and West Asia, and their role in the development of early raw material extraction and metallurgy. He is the author of Au-Sn-W-Cu-Mineralization in the Astaneh-Sarband Area, West Central Iran (2006, https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/48972), and a co-author in: On Salt, Copper and Gold: The Origins of Early Mining and Metallurgy in the Caucasus (2021). Moslem Mishmastnehi is an archaeologist, with a background in cultural heritage conservation, working on various interdisciplinary topics. He has conducted extensive research on the history of Persian windmills and the production of their millstones, using both archaeological and archaeometric methods.ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4219-6027