Oxbow Books

Oxbow Books is a leading publisher in the fields of archaeology, ancient history and medieval studies, with an international reputation for quality and affordability. Oxbow's archaeology publishing covers all periods from earliest prehistory through classical archaeology, the ancient Near East, Egyptology, the Middle Ages and post-medieval archaeology. They publish a wide variety of books including scholarly monographs, edited collections of papers, and excavation and research reports in related fields such as archaeological practice and theory, archaeozoology, and environmental, landscape and maritime archaeology.

Founded in Oxford in 1983 by academic and museum archaeologist, David Brown, Oxbow Books has evolved and expanded significantly over the years. Now celebrating their 40th anniversary, Oxbow remains dedicated to the quality of their publishing for readers, and the contribution their books bring to the scholarly and professional communities more broadly.

The Emergence of Civilisation Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 650
ISBN: 9780977409464
Pub Date: 31 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Description:
Unavailable for too long, this new edition reprints the original text of Renfrew's groundbreaking study, supplemented with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by John Cherry, in order to make this landmark publication available once again.
The Neolithic of Europe Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 340
ISBN: 9781785706547
Pub Date: 31 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: bw and colour
Description:
The Neolithic of Europe comprises eighteen specially commissioned papers on prehistoric archaeology, written by leading international scholars. The coverage is broad, ranging geographically from south-east Europe to Britain and Ireland and chronologically from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, but with a decided focus on the former. Several papers discuss new scientific approaches to key questions in Neolithic research, while others offer interpretive accounts of aspects of the archaeological record.
RRP: £48.00
Antiquarianisms Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9781785706844
Pub Date: 26 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Joukowsky Institute Publication
Description:
Antiquarianism and collecting have been associated intimately with European imperial and colonial enterprises, although both existed long before the early modern period and both were (and continue to be) practiced in places other than Europe. Scholars have made significant progress in the documentation and analysis of indigenous antiquarian traditions, but the clear-cut distinction between “indigenous” and “colonial” archaeologies has obscured the intense and dynamic interaction between these seemingly different endeavours. This book concerns the divide between local and foreign antiquarianisms focusing on case studies drawn primarily from the Mediterranean and the Americas.
RRP: £35.00
Economic Zooarchaeology Cover Economic Zooarchaeology Cover
Format: 
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9781785704451
Pub Date: 26 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9781789253405
Pub Date: 25 Jul 2019
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
Economic archaeology is the study of how past peoples exploited animals and plants, using as evidence the remains of those animals and plants. The animal side is usually termed zooarchaeology, the plant side archaeobotany. What distinguishes them from other studies of ancient animals and plants is that their ultimate aim is to find out about human behaviour – the animal and plant remains are a means to this end.
Death as a Process Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9781785703232
Pub Date: 25 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
The study of funerary practice has become one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of Roman archaeology in recent decades. This volume draws on large-scale fieldwork from across Europe, methodological advances and conceptual innovations to explore new insights from analysis of the Roman dead, concerning both the rituals which saw them to their tombs and the communities who buried them. In particular the volume seeks to establish how the ritual sequence, from laying out the dead to the pyre and tomb, and from placing the dead in the earth to the return of the living to commemorate them, may be studied from archaeological evidence.
RRP: £38.00
Crossing Boundaries Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9781785703072
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
Interdisciplinary studies are increasingly widely recognised as being among the most fruitful approaches to generating original perspectives on the medieval past. In this major collection of 27 papers, contributors transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new approaches to a number of themes ranging in time from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages. The main focus is on material culture, but also includes insights into the compositional techniques of Bede and the Beowulf-poet, and the strategies adopted by anonymous scribes to record information in unfamiliar languages.
RRP: £55.00
Treasures from the Sea Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781785704352
Pub Date: 15 Apr 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
This interdisciplinary volume presents a collection of 17 papers which treat the current state of research on two marine resources used in ancient textile manufacture, shellfish purple dye and sea silk. Purple dye is extracted from the glands of the molluscs Hexaplex trunculus, Bolinus Brandaris and Stramonita Haemastoma which through a chemical reaction of photosynthesis produces hues ranging from dark red to bluish purple colour. The importance of purple dye since ancient times as a status symbol, a sign of royal and religious power is well documented.
RRP: £38.00
Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 282
ISBN: 9781785705199
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Description:
Dorothy Garrod opened many doors; not only was she the first female professor at Cambridge University, but she illuminated - and in some cases initiated - some of prehistoric archaeology's most central issues. The quiet yet self possessed woman was best known as a fieldworker, often venturing into dangerous regions such as Kurdistan. Her first and highly successful excavation revealed fragments of Neanderthal fossils in Gibraltar.
Painting Pots – Painting People Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9781785704390
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
Archaeologists have recently made tremendous advances in understanding the early ceramic traditions of the prehistoric Near East. Over the past decade there has been a huge increase in research focusing on various aspects of ceramic production, its origins and evolution, distribution and consumption in the Late Neolithic (ca. 7000–5000 cal.
RRP: £45.00
Romans and Barbarians Beyond the Frontiers Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 164
ISBN: 9781785706042
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: TRAC Themes in Archaeology
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
This first thematic volume of the new series TRAC Themes in Roman Archaeology brings renowned international experts to discuss different aspects of interactions between Romans and ‘barbarians’ in the north-western regions of Europe. Northern Europe has become an interesting arena of academic debate around the topics of Roman imperialism and Roman–‘barbarian’ interactions, as these areas comprised Roman provincial territories, the northern frontier system of the Roman Empire (limes), the vorlimes (or buffer zone), and the distant barbaricum. This area is, today, host to several modern European nations with very different historical and academic discourses on their Roman past, a factor in the recent tendency towards the fragmentation of approaches and the application of post-colonial theories that have favoured the advent of a varied range of theoretical alternatives.
RRP: £40.00
The Emergence of Pottery in West Asia Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 196
ISBN: 9781785705267
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
Over the past fifty years or so early pottery complexes in the wider region of West Asia have hardly ever been investigated in their own right. Early ceramics have often been unexpected by-products of projects focusing upon much earlier aceramic or later prehistoric periods. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous increase in research in various parts of West Asia focusing explicitly on this theme.
RRP: £70.00
With Alexander in India and Central Asia Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781785705847
Pub Date: 29 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
Alexander conquered most parts of the Western World, but there is a great deal of controversy over his invasion of India, the least known of his campaigns. In BC 327 Alexander came to India, and tried to cross the Jhelum river for the invasion, but was then confronted by King Porus who ruled an area in what is now the Punjab. According to Indian history he was stopped by Porus at his entry into the country, but most of the world still believes that Alexander won the battle.
RRP: £40.00
Excavations by K.M. Kenyon in Jerusalem 1961–1967, 
Volume VI Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 324
ISBN: 9781785706530
Pub Date: 27 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Levant Supplementary Series
Description:
In this volume the principal focus is on the presence/absence of the city walls on the east side of the city from the Iron Age onwards. The evidence for major walls and their structure from Iron Age II to the Byzantine periods in Sites S.II and R.
RRP: £50.00
Arsacids, Romans and Local Elites Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 184
ISBN: 9781785705922
Pub Date: 21 Mar 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
For almost 500 years (247 BCE–224 CE), the Arsacid kings of Parthia ruled over a vast multi-cultural empire, which encompassed much of central Asia and the Near East. The inhabitants of this empire included a complex patchwork of Hellenized Greek-speaking elites, Iranian nobility, and semi-nomadic Asian tribesman, all of whom had their own competing cultural and economic interests. Ruling over such a diverse group of subjects required a strong military and careful diplomacy on the part of the Arsacids, who faced the added challenge of competing with the Roman empire for control of the Near East.
RRP: £36.00
Archaeology of East Asia Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9781785706677
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Description:
Archaeology of East Asia constitutes an introduction to social and political development from the Palaeolithic to 8th-century early historic times. It takes a regional view across China, Korea, Japan and their peripheries that is unbounded by modern state lines. This viewpoint emphasizes how the region drew on indigenous developments and exterior stimuli to produce agricultural technologies, craft production, political systems, religious outlooks and philosophies that characterize the civilization of historic and even modern East Asia.
RRP: £36.00
Dress and Society Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9781785703157
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
While traditional studies of dress and jewellery have tended to focus purely on reconstruction or descriptions of style, chronology and typology, the social context of costume is now a major research area in archaeology. This refocusing is largely a result of the close relationship between dress and three currently popular topics: identity, bodies and material culture. Not only does dress constitute an important means by which people integrate and segregate to form group identities, but interactions between objects and bodies, quintessentially illustrated by dress, can also form the basis of much wider symbolic systems.
RRP: £36.00