Executive Director and Head of Centre for Archaeology and Heritage
Professor of Archaeology and Heritage, University of East Anglia
Simon Kaner MA Cantab, PhD (2004) FSA, FRAS is an archaeologist specialising in the prehistory of Japan. As well as being Executive Director since 2018, he is Head of the Centre for Archaeology and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute. Simon is also Professor of Archaeology and Heritage, and Board Member of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia.
A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Asiatic Society, he has taught and published on many aspects of East Asian and European archaeology. He has undertaken archaeological research in Japan, the UK and elsewhere and worked for several years in archaeological heritage management in the UK. Prior to joining the Sainsbury Institute he was in charge of development-led archaeology for the county of Cambridgeshire. He has been Council Member of the Society for East Asian Archaeology and the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society.
He has curated a number of exhibitions, including at the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. His most recent exhibitions were Nara to Norwich: art and belief at the ends of the Silk Roads in Norwich (May 2024) and Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre (2022-23).
He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Korea and Japan (with Gary Crawford and Gyoung-Ah Lee) and a new volume on the Origins of Agriculture in Asia and the Pacific in Global Perspective (with Liliana Janik and Kenichi Yano). He is Co-Editor of the Japanese Journal of Archaeology (www.jjarchaeology.jp), and Series Editor of Comparative Studies in Japanese Archaeology and Heritage (Archaeopress) and The Science of the History of Humanity in Asia and the Pacific (Springer).
He was on the international advisory committees for the UNESCO World Heritage nominations of the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region and Jōmon Sites of Northern Japan. His current research projects include Global Perspectives on British Archaeology, The Shinano-Chikuma River Project: investigating the historic environments of Japanese longest river drainage, Nara to Norwich: art and belief at the ends of the Silk Roads, and he directs the Online Jomon Matsuri in partnership with the Centre for Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is also on the International Advisory Board for Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WIVA) at Uppsala University.
In 2011 he was awarded the 10th Miyasaki Eiichi Togariishi Jomon Prize. In 2024 the Sainsbury Institute received a Japan Foundation Award and two Foreign Minister’s Commendations, one for the Institute as a whole and one personally for Simon Kaner.
His research interests include: Japanese prehistory and the history of archaeology in Japan; the urban historic environment in Japan in comparative perspective; Japanese cultural heritage and the international role of Japanese heritage management. He is director of the Shinano River project, investigating the development of historic landscapes along the longest river system in the Japanese archipelago.
Selected publications
Recent articles
- ‘From Norwich to Nara: reflections on Silk Road connections’. The Historian 161 (2024): 14-19. Guest editor of the same issue on the Silk Roads (with Katy Cubitt and Susan Whitfield).
- Japan’s royal tombs. Burial mounds and Korean connections in the 3rd to 8th centuries’. AD. Current World Archaeology 123 (2024).
- ‘The Tomio Maruyama tomb. Discovering the longest sword and largest mirror in ancient Japan’. Current World Archaeology 124 (2024): 24-28.
- ウエルビイングのための考古学 [Archaeology for well-being]. Kokogaku Kenkyu 71.3:3-10.
- ‘Conjuring up Prehistory: landscape and the archaic in Japanese nationalism and Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia by Mark Hudson (review)’ in Monumenta Nipponica 78.2 (2023): 223-230.
Books
- Okinoshima: the Outstanding Universal Value of Japan’s Sacred Heritage (forthcoming, Nov 2025).
- Leiko Ikemura: Usagi in Wonderland. (2024, Editor). Dortmund, Verlag Kettler.
- Japan and the World: artistic and cultural flows (ed. 2021).
- An Illustrated Companion to Japanese Archaeology (2nd ed. 2020)
- The Archaeology of Medieval Towns: case studies from Japan and Europe (2020), (edited with Brian Ayers, Richard Pearson and Oscar Wrenn).
- The Power of Dogu: ceramic figures from ancient Japan (2009), which accompanied a major exhibition at the British Museum and An Illustrated Companion to Japanese Archaeology (edited with Werner Steinhaus, Shinya Shoda and Megumi Jinno, 2nd Edition 2020).
- Jomon Reflections: Forager Life and Culture in the Prehistoric Japanese Archipelago by Kobayashi Tatsuo (2005), which he adapted and edited with Nakamura Oki.