Carolin Jauß studied Near Eastern Archaeology, Languages of the Ancient Near East and Middle Eastern Studies at the Asian Studies Department, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. and Anthropology at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. For her master’s thesis she analyzed early Bronze Age to Islamic pottery from a survey in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains (“Der Antilibanon-Survey 2001/2002. Bearbeitung des Fundmaterials und methodische Einordnung. Mit einer Betrachtung der naturräumlichen Gegebenheiten und sozioökonomischen Potentiale.“). After a stay at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, she was a teaching and research assistant at the Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie. Currently she is writing her doctoral thesis on the role of ceramic vessels in commensal practice within the project “Commensality and Shared Space in the Context of Early State and Urban Development in Mesopotamia and Southwest Iran” of the Topoi research group C-III Acts.