Maxime Poulain (°1989) studied archaeology at Ghent University and completed a post-graduate GIS course at University College Ghent. In 2013, he obtained an IWT scholarship for the project titled 'The habits of war: early modern ceramics in Flanders'. This PhD research focused on the archaeology of early modern Flanders, and particularly on the use of ceramics in the construction of identities. After some months in Flemish commercial archaeology, he worked as a post-doc at the Historical Archaeology Research Group (HARG). A first project dealt with 19th-century Belgian immigrants in the U.S.A. through the analysis of material culture, house-building traditions, and landscapes. In a second post-doc project, he studied the material culture of the many merchant communities in medieval Bruges and its outports along the Zwin tidal inlet. Maxime is now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at the University of Tübingen, focusing on pathogen genomics in medieval Bruges, but still attached to UGent as a collaborator.