Nicola Laneri is a professor of Archeology and Art History of the Ancient Near East and Scientific Director of the Museum of Archeology at the University of Catania. He is also Director of the School of Religious Studies (Florence). From 2003 to 2016 he was director of the Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project (Turkey), since 2017 he has been co-director of the Ganja Region Kurgan Archaeological Project (Azerbaijan) and since 2021 he has been director of the Baghdad Urban Archaeological Project (Iraq). In 2000 he was appointed Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University, in 2002-2003 visiting professor at the Middle East Technical University of Ankara and in 2005-2006 Research fellow at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He is currently National Coordinator of the PRIN Project entitled Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the Eastern Mediterranean. During the course of his career he organized and participated in hundreds of international conferences and conventions and wrote more than one hundred essays and articles of international importance, among which the volumes From Ritual to God in the Ancient Near East: Tracing the Origins of stand out. Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Archeology of Near Eastern religions: For a material approach to the Sacred (La Sapienza, 2022), The Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project 2003-2013 Final Report. Chronology and Material Culture (Bradypus, 2016) Archeology of death (Carocci, 2011), Biography of a vase (Pandemos, 2009), The funerary customs of the middle Euphrates valley during the 3rd millennium BC. (L'Orientale, 2004), and the curators The Bloomsbury Handbook of Material Religion in the Ancient Near East and Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2023), Sacred Body. Materializing the Divine through Human Remains in Antiquity (Oxbow, 2021), Defining the Sacred: Approaches to the Archeology of Religion in the Near East (Oxbow 2015). Performing Death: The Social Analysis of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean ( Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 2007).