Dmitri M. Bondarenko is Vice-Director for Research at the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the International Center of Anthropology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and Professor in Social Anthropology at the Russian State Univesity for the Humanities (all in Moscow).  Bondarenko has conducted fieldwork in a number of African countries (Tanzania, Nigeria, Benin, Rwanda, Zambia, and Uganda) and among people of African descent in Russia and the USA. Bondarenko is the author of various international publications. His major research interests include political anthropology, culture and history of Africa south of the Sahara, socio-cultural transformations and intercultural interaction with special focus on Africa and people of African descent worldwide.

Stephen A. Kowalewski is a Professor Emeritus based at the Laboratory of Archaeology, Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia(USA). He has done archaeological field work in Arizona and Georgia, and carried out regional-scale archaeological settlement pattern surveys in Oaxaca, Mexico, covering the Valles Centrales, Peñoles, central Mixteca Alta, and the Coixtlahuaca valley. Kowalewski's main research interests, reflected in numerous publications, include demography, human ecology, economic anthropology, regional analysis, social history, and most recently, the archaeology of social institutions.

David B. Small is a Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (USA). Holding a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, in 2015 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Department of History and Classical Studies, University of Crete in Rethymno. He has conducted archaeological excavations in Central America, Israel, and Greece and published extensively on empirical and theoretical  issues of social structure and evolution in ancient Greece, Mesoamerica, and Polynesia.