Ted Banning was born in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in southern Ontario, receiving his PhD in Near Eastern archaeology at University of Toronto in 1985. His broad archaeological interests eventually settled down on the Near Eastern Neolithic, including a role on the senior staff of the 'Ain Ghazal Neolithic excavations in Jordan from 1982 to 1989 and directing his own project on a series of small Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze Age sites in northern Jordan from 1987 onward. He is a professor in the Anthropology Department of University of Toronto, where he teaches archaeological lab methods, landscape archaeology, and settlement archaeology and pursues research on Near Eastern prehistory and archaeological survey methods.