Rocco Palermo is a Research Fellow at the University of Pisa (Italy) and Affiliate Research Fellow at Harvard University. He specializes in landscape archaeology of southwest Asia, focusing particularly on the spatial impact of large territorial empires in Mesopotamia from the end of the Iron Age to the first millennium AD. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in the Near East (Syria, Jordan, Oman, Iraq) and he is the current director of the Gird-I Matrab Archaeological Project (Iraqi Kurdistan) and Associate Director of the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (Iraqi Kurdistan). Rocco is the author of On the Edge of Empires. Mesopotamia during the Roman Period (Routledge 2019).