Matteo Valleriani is fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) where he is coordinator of the project area “Mental Models in the History of Knowledge: The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science.” Matteo Valleriani’s research interests include projects on ‘Professional Knowledge of the Practitioners’ (MPIWG), ‘History of Shipbuilding and Architecture’ (MPIWG), and ‘Jesuits on Statics, Dynamics, Mathematics and Astronomy between Galileo and Newton’ (University of Tel Aviv and MPIWG). Within Topoi, Mateo Valleriani heads the Cross-Sectional Group III “Technology Transfer in Antiquity”.

Michael Meyer is professor of Prehistoric Archeology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since February 2011, he has been director of the Excellence Cluster Topoi being the successor to Friederike Fless. Currently he heads projects on the origins of iron-smelting and on migrations during the Iron Age and leads the excavations in the Roman battlefield at the edge of the Harz Mountains (Lower Saxony, Germany). Michael Meyer is chairman of the AGIBB (Archeological Society) and member of the Roman-Germanic Commission and the German Archeological Institute. Within Topoi, Michael Meyer works on the analysis of late Iron Age ceramics which help us understand better technology transfer and economical spaces in Antiquity.