Curriculum Vitae Massimo Vidale was born in Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza, Italy) on April 10th, 1956. He is married, has one daughter and is an Italian citizen. He presently lives in Rome, where he works as an archaeologist for the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione e il Restauro (ISCR), the leading Italian institution in matter of conservation and advanced technologies applied to cultural heritage. His main field of expertise includes the study of ancient craft technologies and their relevance to the understanding of early state formation processes, the study of contemporary traditional craft technologies from an ethnoarchaeological perspective, and the survey of archaeological sites in the broader frame of their ancient landscapes. He got his MA degree in Oriental Archaeology in 1980 at the University of Padua (Italy) with a thesis on the ceramic sequence of Shahr-i Sokhta (3rd millennium BC). In 1987 he got his Research Doctorate at the Istituto Universitario Orientale (Naples, Italy) with a thesis on the geoarchaeological formation processes of the craft activitiy areas detected by an Italian-German project on the surface of Mohenjo-Daro (Pakistan), under the supervision of Maurizio Tosi. Between 1987 and 1988 he was a Fellow in Material Analysis at the Conservation Analytical Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC). The research he accomplished at CAL under the tutorship of J. M. Blackman was centered on the chemical characterization of the stoneware bangles found at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Later (1987-1988) he got a NATO postdoctoral grant that allowed him to continue his collaboration with the SI and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA) further developing his studies of the ancient craft industries of the Indus Civilization. Between 1987 and 1988 he studied at the Italian Archaeological School of Athens, where he got a specialization in Ancient Greek and Roman Archaeology. In this context he carried out a complete catalogue of the images of craftpersons at work on Attic and Corinthian wares between the VIth and the IVth centuries BC, and published it in a single volume, defining the archaeological and historical implications of the evolution of iconography. He is a member of IsIAO (formerly IsMEO) since 1987 and the vicepresident and co-founder of the Italian Association for Ethnoarchaeology (1997). He has regularly participated to the South Asian Archaeological meetings in European academic seats.
Since 1976, he has an uninterrupted record of field experience in Italy, Middle and South Asia and (secondarily) north Africa. He has carried out archaeological and ethnoarchaeological projects in Italy, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, India, Nepal, Tunisia and Eritrea. At ISCR he has been continuously involved in archaeometric research projects on the materials he found during surveys and excavations (identification of rocks and minerals, archaeometallurgy, high-temperature ceramic products, and more recently identification of organic residues by the means of GC-MS). His major current projects are the collaboration to the Iranian excavations at the newly discovered sites of Konar Sandal (Kerman, Iran), centered on the rescue excavations of the IVth-IIIrd millennium BC site of Mathoutabad; the Archaeological Map of the Swat Valley (Swat, Pakistan); the survey of the Holocenic sites between the gulf of Zula and the Danakil coast (Eritrea); and the systematic publication of the materials from Shahr-i Sokhta presently stored at Rome (lapis lazuli, chalcedony beads and ceramics). He is also collaborating with the physical anthropologists of the Museo L. Pigorini and University “La Sapienza”, Rome, in the study of the artificial modifications of human teeth in the Neolithic cemetery of Mehrgarh, Pakistan, that brought to the discovery of the oldest practices of dentistic surgery in the world. He taught ancient technology classes at ISCR school for conservators from 1990 to 2003. Between 1995 and 1998 he was visiting professor of History of Craft Production and Material Culture at the University of Genova (Italy). From 1999 to 2002 he was invited to teach ancient technology classes at the Italian Archaeological School of Athens. From 1999 to 2008 he was visiting professor of Prehistory and Protohistory of Asia at the Faculty of Conservation of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna (Ravenna, Italy). Since 2006 he is visiting professor of Taphonomy and Funerary Archaeology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, and in this context he is busy in developing micro-stratigraphic approaches to the excavation of urns with cremated remains and the testing of analytical chromatography for the detailed reconstruction of cremation processes. He is presently Visiting Professor of Archaeology of Craft Production at the University of Padua (Italy). He is the author of more than 300 specialistic papers on the results of his research, as many papers addressed to a more general audience, 8 books (excavation reports and major archaeological summaries) and a co-edited BAR volume.