Abstract. Sulfur is an essential biological element, yet its biochemistry in anaerobic biofilm is poorly understood because there are few tools for studying this element in biological systems. X-ray absorption spectroscopy provides a unique approach to determining the chemical speciation of sulfur in intact biological samples. When treating sulfate containing wastewaters in full scale up-flow anaerobic sludge bed bioreactors, microbial activity forms biofilms, consisting of a complex mixture of cells and associated extracellular substances as well as undefined inorganic precipitates. In addition to the anaerobic sludges, a large variety of model compounds of S (esp. sulfides) were investigated to find consistencies in the XANES that were used to model each "valence state" of S. The results confirmed that attributing a specific valence to most sulfides is impossible as we measured a continuum of edge shifts from sulfur "-2" to "-1", depending on the electronic structure of S in the probed sulfides. In the sludges, various sulfur hot spots were probed for speciation, despite photo-reduction was sometimes a problem. First, we index the main features of complex K-edge XANES spectra for S^2--type units and sulfate units. Organic sulfur compounds were also shown to contribute significantly to the sulfur species present in some anaerobic granular sludge.