Massimo Vidale is a professor of Near Eastern archaeology and archaeology of handicraft at the University of Padova in Italy. In the first years of his career he embarked on excavation at Shahr-i Sokhta (1976-1977) and since then he remained passionately in love with ancient Iran and its heritage. During the previous years, he has cooperated with several Iranian archeologists and has been working in the Halil Rud valley (Jiroft region) and once again in the Iranian Sistan. His main field of research is the ancient structure of specialized handcraft and the relationships of such activities with the political organization of early city-states.