Alireza Askari Chaverdi is the Iranian director of the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, a professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiraz University, and Vice-Chancellor of the newly created Shiraz University of Arts. He has carried out several excavations in the province of Fars, focusing on the Achaemenid to the Sasanian periods. Under the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, he has co-directed the project "From Palace to Town" since 2008, aiming to expandknowledge of the inhabited town located near the Imperial Citadel of Persepolis; since 2011 the project has been working on a monumental gate of the Early Achaemenid period discovered at Tol-e Ajori, 3.5 km to the West of Persepolis. He has published four monographs and several articles on the archaeology and art of Pre-Islamic Iran. Pierfrancesco Callieri is the Italian director of the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission and a professor at the Department for Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna. He studied Buddhist archaeology and then the archaeology of inhabited settlement in the Swat Valley of Northern Pakistan before moving (in 2005) to Fars, Iran. Under the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, he has also co-directed the project "From Palace to Town". He has published four monographs and more than 150 articles on the archaeology and art of the region from Syria to Northern India during the pre-Islamic historic periods.