A Special Issue of Quaternary International titled “Geoarchaeology: A toolbox for revealing latent data in sedimentological and archaeological records” was published on July 30, 2018. Yasuhisa Kondo, associate professor at RIHN, contributed to this publication as a guest editor. The issue compiles 15 cutting-on-edge papers associated with geoarchaeology, or archaeological science based on geosciences, based on presentations at the geoarchaeology session at the 8th World Archaeological Congress (WAC-8) held in Kyoto in 2016.

Geoarchaeology stems from “the application of geosciences and geographical methods to prehistory, archaeology, and history” (Fouache 2010), although it has been developed to an interdisciplinary field in combination of various scientific methods including geographical information systems, satellite remote sensing, and stable isotope analysis.

In the editorial co-authored with Tara Beuzen-Waller and Friederike Stock, Kondo argues for the methodological importance of geoarchaeology as a toolbox for interdisciplinary synthesis to reveal past human-environment relationships. The conceptual foundation of this special issue originated from the collaborative research of the editors held at RIHN after the WAC.