Dr Mark Hudson

Mark Hudson was educated at SOAS (BA, 1986), Cambridge (M.Phil., 1988) and the Australian National University (PhD, 1996). He taught archaeology and anthropology at Okayama, Tsukuba and West Kyushu Universities from 1996 to 2015. From 2016-2017, he was Professor at the Mt Fuji World Heritage Centre, Shizuoka where he helped design the prize-winning exhibits on Mount Fuji. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Japan, Israel, Syria, the UK and Slovenia. Mark is a PhD supervisor for Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Ljubljana University. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Publications

Mark Hudson has written or co-edited 11 books and published more than 100 academic papers. He received the John Whitney Hall prize of the Association for Asian Studies for his monograph Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999). 

Recent publications:

Hudson, M., 24 Hours in Shōgun's Japan (Michael O'Mara Books, 2026) [German translation 24 Stunden im alten Japan (Penguin, Nov. 2026)

Robbeets, M. and Hudson, M. (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Hudson, M., Europe and the End of Medieval Japan (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)

Hudson, M. and Zancan, C. (2025) Environmental archaeology and eco-nativist discourse in modern Japan, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology 4: 1697454.

Zancan, C., Knapen, M., Mylona, D., Bausch, I., Fernandes, R., Cocozza, C., Robbeets, M. and Hudson, M. (2025) A Database of Pictorial Evidence of Aquatic Animals and Fishing Practices in Prehistoric Japan. Journal of Open Archaeology Data 13: 21.

Hudson, M., Uchiyama, J., Zancan, C., Šukelj, K., Cabral Bernabé, R., Bjørn, R., Bausch, I. and Muñoz Fernández, I. (2025) Maritime networks as a vector for early farming/language dispersals: a comparative review. Quaternary Environments and Humans 3(2): e100066. 

Hudson, M. (2025) Hidden transcripts of the Christian Century: power and global goods in early modern Japan. Forum Kritische Archäologie 14: 50-59.

Research Projects

• Let's do it ALL: Agriculture, Land and Language in Kofun Japan
• The Anthropocene Engine at Sea: Archaeolinguistic Perspectives on the Blue Acceleration
• IsoMemo