Home Partner Publishers Series Blog About Us Catalogues Contact Us
Archaeology & Ancient History
Arts & Architecture
Aviation
Hobbies & Lifestyle
Humanities
Medieval World
Military History
Modelling & Transport
Modern Warfare
Natural World
Numismatics
Science & Technology
Social Sciences & Culture
Theology & Religion
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.

Death as a Process Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9781785703232
Pub Date: 25 May 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Studies in Funerary Archaeology
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
Series: Ancient Textiles
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
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
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
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.
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
The Lost Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9781785703119
Pub Date: 27 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Illustrations: b/w and colour
Description:
Trusty's Hill is an early medieval fort at Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfries and Galloway. The hillfort comprises a fortified citadel defined by a vitrified rampart around its summit, with a number of enclosures looping out along lower-lying terraces and crags. The approach to its summit is flanked on one side by a circular rock-cut basin and on the other side by Pictish Symbols carved on to the face of a natural outcrop of bedrock.
Ancient Egyptian Furniture Volume I Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 160
ISBN: 9781785704819
Pub Date: 24 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Ancient Egyptian Furniture
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
This revised second edition examines the common forms of furniture used in ancient Egypt, so much of which has been preserved by the dry Egyptian climate and has long been admired for the quality of its design and construction. The story begins with the earliest known pieces and ends with the spectacular discoveries from the 18th dynasty represented mainly by the magnificent furniture from the tomb of Tutankhamun. The insight which Dr Killen brings in the detailed explanations of the materials, techniques and designs of the master craftsmen of ancient Egypt, gives this book a special significance.
RRP: £60.00
Ancient Egyptian Furniture Volume II Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9781785704857
Pub Date: 24 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Ancient Egyptian Furniture
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
In this revised second edition Dr Killen continues his survey of Egyptian furniture-making techniques with a study of boxes, chests and footstools and traces their evolution from the earliest times. Wooden, papyrus and alabaster boxes and chests were used to hold, protect and store valuable objects, toilet utensils, instruments, tools, garments, curtains, game pieces and papyri amongst other things. Those from the Old Kingdom usually had flat lids and solid board sides, tied together at the corners.
RRP: £60.00
Ancient Egyptian Furniture Volume III Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9781785704895
Pub Date: 24 Feb 2017
Imprint: Oxbow Books
Series: Ancient Egyptian Furniture
Illustrations: b/w
Description:
In this third volume Dr Killen investigates how woodworking in ancient Egypt developed in the 19th and 20th dynasties. It establishes the range of wooden furniture manufactured during this period by surveying examples depicted in Ramesside Theban and Memphite tombs. Ancient records show how the procurement of furniture occurred at Deir el-Medina while the design and manufacturing of these furniture forms can be traced through a series of furniture sketches that are annotated with a range of marks and signs.
RRP: £60.00
© Pen and Sword Books Limited 2024. Registered in England No. 2527258.
Registered Office: 47 Church Street, Barnsley, S70 2AS.