Open lectures by Visiting Professors from Japan and the USA at the Faculty of Historical and Pedagogical Sciences

Prof. Yoshitaka Kanomata (Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University, Japan)
An archaeologist and anthropologist with 30 years of research experience in the prehistoric period of Japanese history, Prof. Kanomata is a leading specialist in traceology and multifaceted analyses of lithic artefacts. Since 2009, he has been an Associate Professor at Tohoku University, one of Japan’s most prestigious institutions (ranked 107th in the QS World University Rankings), and has held a full Professorship since 2020. In 2015, he was awarded the Young Researchers Award by the Japanese Society of Paleolithic Association.

He has led numerous grant-funded projects supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Saitō Hō-on Kai Museum of Natural History. Prof. Kanomata has authored or co-authored 161 scholarly publications in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese, appearing in leading journals such as Antiquity, Radiocarbon, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, and Documenta Praehistorica, as well as in book chapters published in the Quantitative Archaeology and Archaeological Modelling series by Springer Nature. He has also authored or co-authored 15 academic monographs in archaeology and delivered over 110 presentations at international conferences and symposia worldwide.

In his research on Japan’s prehistoric period in the context of East Asian interactions, he has conducted pioneering analyses of materials from archaeological sites in China, Mongolia, and Russia. To investigate the hypothesis of contact between Japan and Ecuador in prehistoric times, the so-called Jōmon-Valdivia hypothesis, he has carried out groundbreaking studies of ceramic and preceramic archaeological sites in Ecuador.

Prof. Daniel H. Sandweiss (University of Maine, USA)
A world-renowned archaeologist and anthropologist, Prof. Daniel H. Sandweiss is a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, and a graduate of Yale University and Cornell University. He specialises in the interdisciplinary retrieval of palaeoclimatic data from archaeological contexts and the reconstruction of the impacts of climatic and environmental changes on past societies.

For many years, he has conducted extensive archaeological research in Peru, spanning the period from the Late Pleistocene to the Spanish conquest. He has authored and co-authored over 80 articles in leading international journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, PLoS ONE, and Science Advances, as well as major publications in archaeology and Earth sciences. He has also authored, co-authored, and edited numerous scholarly monographs.

Prof. Sandweiss is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Andean Past, and serves on the editorial boards of Latin American Antiquity, Island and Coastal Archaeology, Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, and Journal of Archaeology and Education and Quaternary. He has also acted as editor for PNAS and Chungara. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Geological Society of America, the SAA Board of Directors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014).

He has served as long-standing President of the Society for American Archaeology and the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and as Vice-President of the Institute for Andean Research Board. Prof. Sandweiss has received numerous academic awards, including the SAA Presidential Recognition Awards (2008, 2012, 2019), the Archaeological Geology Award from the Geological Society of America (2016), the University of Maine Presidential Award for Research and Creative Achievement (2017), and the Distinguished Maine Professor Award (2022).