Johanna Klügl is an object conservator specialised in archaeological bark objects from ice patches and waterlogged contexts. She obtained her degree in 2007 at the HTW Berlin. Since 2008 she is working at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Berne (Switzerland) and responsible for the conservation of the alpine organic finds from the Schnidejoch and Lötschenpass. In 2011/12 she continued her education and attended master courses in Conservation and Restoration at HTW Berlin and graduated in April 2013 at the Bern University of Arts. In 2015 she received her second Master of Arts in Research on the Arts at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences of the University of Bern. In 2016, she began her PhD at the Graduate School of the Arts of the University of Bern, which aims to develop a long-term conservation strategy for the preservation of the first and only Neolithic bow case made of birch bark from the Schnidejoch. Her doctoral research was part of the four-year interdisciplinary research project (2016-2020) "Unfreezing History" which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Albert Hafner studied Prehistoric Archaeology, Ethnology and Biology at the Universities of Tübingen, Freiburg i.Brsg. (dissertation) and Zurich (habilitation). His dissertation dealt with the Early Bronze Age of Western Switzerland, while his habilitation research focused on high-altitude Alpine archaeology in the context of resource use strategies, mobility and climate change. He worked in the field of archaeological monument conservation, carried out large-scale rescue excavation projects in the field of underwater and wetland archaeology and was instrumental in the successful nomination of the pile dwellings of the Alpine space as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Since 2012 he holds a full professorship in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Bern with projects on the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Europe. Within the framework of an ERC Synergy Grant, he currently researches on lake-side settlements in the Balkans. His research interests include Holocene human-environment relationships, social developments and elites, burial rites, underwater archaeology and alpine archaeology.