Tracking the Neolithic in the Near East

Nishiaki, YoshihiroProf. Dr. Yoshihiro Nishiaki, born in 1961, received his BA and MA from the University of Tokyo, and Ph.D. from University College London. He has been a full professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Tokyo since 2006 and Director of the University of Tokyo Museum since 2020. His major research interest is concerned with the prehistory of West and Central Asia, particularly the origins and development of farming socio-economy and the replacement of Neanderthals by anatomically modern humans in those regions.Maeda, OsamuDr. 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.Arimura, Makotoprof. Dr. Makoto Arimura is a professor at Tokai University, Japan. He obtained his undergraduate degree in archaeology (1995) from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, under Professor Akira Tsuneki, and his PhD in archaeology (2007) from the Université Lumière Lyon 2, France, under Professor Olivier Aurenche and Dr Éric Coqueugniot. After a project assistant post at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto (2006), he worked at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (NRICP) as a research fellow (2007-2012). His primary research topic is the transformation of human society during Neolithisation, through changes in material culture, particularly the transition of stone tool manufacturing technology in the Neolithic Near East.

This book combines the latest studies of Near Eastern Neolithic lithics by leading international archaeologists to develop their analytical potential and advance our understanding of the world oldest farming societies of the Near East in human history.This volume presents the proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Chipped and Ground Stone Industries of the Near East, hosted at the University of Tokyo, Japan, from November 12 to 16, 2019 (PPN9-Tokyo).A unique point of the volume, while referring to the origins and development as in the proceedings of the previous conferences, is a greater emphasis on regional perspectives to evaluate the Near Eastern Neolithic. The current research indicates that the earliest farming societies of the Near East developed in interaction with neighbouring hunter-gatherer societies, that either coexisted with them for long periods or soon assimilated to the Near Eastern farmers. Understanding these contrasting processes would shed new light on identifying the Neolithisation practices of the "core" regions in the Near East itself. A similar attempt was made at the PPN2-Warsaw in 1995, but the present volume provides the most up-to-date discoveries and perspectives after a quarter century.The 39 papers in this volume include contributions on the Iranian Zagros, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, a region whose Neolithic archaeological records are far less well understood but that we believe will enrich our understanding of the first farming societies of the Near East.