The primary objective of this new edition is the interdisciplinary exploration of ancient geo-resources—including copper, gold, silver, lead, tin, and iron—and their impact on early metalworking through a combination of traditional and modern scientific investigative methods. It examines the chaîne opératoire, tracing the entire process from the extraction of raw materials (mining archaeology) to the production and alloying of metals through technological operations (archaeometallurgy), which leave behind archaeological traces that are often fragmentary and require reconstruction to understand ancient metallurgical practices.

Andreas Hauptmann, professor emeritus for Archaeometry/archaeometallurgy at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum/Leibniz Research Museum for Georesources. He headed the archaeometallurgy research group for many years. In cooperation with archaeologists- His research has largely focused on ancient mining and metallurgy. He has visited many countries in the Old World and performed field work in the Near and Middle East. He has investigated archaeological materials used in the production of copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, iron and tin using modern analytical methods to explore old technologies and to reconstruct trade ways. He has taught at the Universities of Bochum, Frankfurt and Fribourg, Switzerland, as well as the Department of Anthropology, University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA.

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. He then worked in exploration geology for private companies in Iran. For 13 years, he worked as Assistant Professor of Deposit Science at the Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University, Tehran. Since the end of 2020, he has been Deputy Head of the Archaeometallurgy Research Department at the German Mining Museum Bochum and has been teaching at the Institute of Prehistory and Early History at Ruhr University. His focus is on the deposits of Iran and West Asia and their role in the development of early raw material extraction and metallurgy. In this context, he has participated in mining archaeological surveys, expeditions and excavations as well as archaeometallurgical investigations in the research laboratory of the German Mining Museum Bochum.