Dr David H Caldwell is Keeper of Scotland and Europe for National Museums Scotland. He has been privileged to be the curator responsible for the eleven chessmen in Edinburgh for the last 37 years and has long been fascinated by them. His other research interests include the history and archaeology of the Western Isles in medieval times, and in the 1990s he directed major excavations at Finlaggan, in the Island of Islay. He has recently had published a history of Islay – Islay The Land of the Lordship (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008).
Mark A. Hall is History Officer at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, where he curates the archaeology collection. He has long-standing interests in medieval material culture (in which the recognised collections of Perth are very rich), including Pictish sculpture, the cult of saints and play, especially board and dice games, in part stemming from a long-standing fascination with the Lewis chessmen. His interest in play culture extends to research on the way the medieval period (and archaeology more generally) is portrayed in cinema.
Dr Caroline M. Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology at the Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification, University of Dundee. She is an expert in faces and craniofacial identification and her research focuses on the relationship between the soft and hard tissues of the face, juvenile faces, facial recognition, anthropometry and facial image analysis. She has carried out craniofacial analysis for many archaeological investigations and her work is exhibited in museums around the world and is included on television programmes such as ‘History Cold Case’ (BBC), ‘Meet the Ancestors’ (BBC), ‘Secrets of the Dead’ (C4) and ‘Mummies Unwrapped’ (Discovery).