Juris Zarins (Zariņš) (February 17, 1945 – July 8, 2023) was a German-born American archaeologist and professor at Missouri State University, who specialized in the Middle East.

The team was composed of NASA scientists Ronald Blom and Charles Elachi, filmmaker and archaeologist Nicholas Clapp and British explorer Ranulph Fiennes.

"In 1996, a joint effort from Juris Zarins, George Hedges and Ronald Blom sprang the creation of a website called The Archaeology Fund.

The decline of the region was probably due to several factors: frankincense trade diminished in importance because of the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, which did not require incense in the same quantities for its rituals, the climatic changes led to desiccation of the area (desert ground-water levels continued to fall and the oases dried up), while sea transport became a more reliable way of carrying goods.

[10] Zarins published many articles on a number of topics concerning the archaeology of the Near East, which included the domestication of the horse, early pastoral nomadism, and the obsidian, indigo, and frankincense trades.

He has proposed that the Semitic languages arose as a result of a circum-Arabian nomadic pastoral complex, which developed in the period of the desiccation of climates at the end of the pre-pottery phase in the Ancient Near East.

Zarins argued that the Garden of Eden was situated at the head of the Persian Gulf (present-day Kuwait), where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers run into the sea, from his research on this area using information from many different sources, including LANDSAT images from space.