Battered Books Seek Caring New Home... Part II

Our first damaged book feature, last month, produced an overwhelming response. Of 35 books listed, 20 of them sold within the first 2 hours; including one to a reader who was checking his email whilst waiting for a plane in Malta! We're pleased to bring another helping to your attention.

Proof that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover

Every now and then a book appears on the shelf that I don’t like the look of for one reason or another. Perhaps the cover is a bit boring, I don’t like the title, or I’m not particularly interested in the subject. Based on the old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and the fact that you can only put these things off for so long, I take a deep breath and begin reading.

Of all the new books that have passed over the desks of the Oxbow staff this month, these, for whatever reason, are the ones that grabbed their attention.

New Releases

Unsettling the Neolithic
edited by Douglass Bailey, Alasdair Whittle and Vicki Cummings

This book takes a fresh look at the European Neolithic and asks pertinent questions about the way in which we study it. By unsettling accepted notions regarding sedentism and the onset of farming, the contributors are able to show that many ideas which are taken as read may need re-evaluating in the light of new modes of thinking. Sedentism and mobility form the bulk of this volume's focus, and a number of papers look at these concepts through examining/re-examining certain sites or collections of sites. Paul Halstead makes the case that sedentism does not preclude a large degree of mobility. Bailey asks us to completely re-think our attitude to the built environment of the Neolithic, arguing that we are trapped by details as to the purpose of structures, rather than on what effect their presence had on the people who used them. Taken together, these fourteen papers encourage us to move beyond the search for sedentism or mobility as a characteristic of society.

Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice
edited by Martin Wayne
Paperback. GB £18.00

A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer. Today, corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study. In this volume, a selection of leading experts in various key areas of corpus construction offer advice in a readable and largely non-technical style to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well designed and fit for the intended purpose. This guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will find the guidelines here useful. It is also aimed at those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their studies.

Archaeological Perspectives on the Transmission and Transformation of Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean
edited by Joanne Clark
Hardback. GB £40.00

The eastern Mediterranean was the centre of trade for many centuries, sitting at the junction of what are now Europe, Asia and Africa. It was the place where exotic produce and products could be traded or exchanged for things that had their origins perhaps thousands of miles away. But wherever trade takes place, a similar exchange of ideas, technology and culture also occurs. This book presents thirty papers on this very subject, looking at the ways in which we can measure the transmission of culture, and how this transmission varied across time and space.