Dr. Osamu Maeda

Osamu Maeda received his BA and MA degrees from University of Tsukuba and Ph.D. from University of Manchester. He has been a researcher at University of Tsukuba since 2015 and currently is an associate professor in the archaeology course and a head of the archaeology division of the Research Center for West Asian Civilization. He is recently conducting international collaborative research as a member of the Manchester Obsidian Laboratory. His 25 years-experience of fieldworks in the Near East includes excavations of Neolithic sites by international teams in Syria, Turkey and Iraq-Kurdistan.

His research interest is social roles and social meanings of material culture in the Neolithic societies in the Near East, particularly focusing on obsidian exchange, lithic technology and materiality of chipped stones, in relation with the formation of social identities of Neolithic people. He is a co-editor of ‘The State of the Stone: Terminologies, Continuities and Contexts in Near Eastern Lithics’ (ex oriente, 2011).