Oliver Nelle studied Biology in Freiburg i.Br. and Edinburgh. He received a doctors degree from the faculty of biology and preclinical medicine, university of Regensburg, in 2003, with a dissertation on the vegetation history of the Bavarian Forest. From 2004 to 2012, he was a lecturer in Historical Geobotany at the University of Kiel, and one year at Aix-Marseille University. Since 2014 he heads the tree-ring laboratory of the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege in Hemmenhofen, doing research in dendrochronology, anthracology and „tree archaeology“.

Elena Marinova is currently head of the Archaeobotany Lab at the Baden-Württemberg State Office for Cultural Heritage and Associated Professor at INA, University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests are the long-term perspective on the human impact on the environment, but also how environmental constrains shaped the economy and subsistence of the past human societies. Further, she seeks for effective mechanisms to integrate in state of the art research questions also the environmental archaeological data obtained through developer driven archaeology. Between 2007-2017 she was research fellow at the Centre for Archaeological Sciences, KULeuven, Belgium and worked at several international projects in the Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe dealing with past subsistence and land use practices. From 2001-2007 she was assistant professor at Laboratory for Palynology, dept. Botany at the Sofia University, Bulgaria.