March 2006 Issue
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| FEATURES | ||||||||
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Whose Marbles are these anyway? Ethical archaeology in the 21st century The Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 passed without a resolution in the debate over the return of the Elgin Marbles. Dorothy King’s new history of the Parthenon and its infamous sculptures concludes with some outspoken views on the political, moral and ethical issues of their return. This final chapter on who ‘owns’ the Marbles leads us nicely on to two new books that debate current ethical issues in archaeology. | |||||||
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ISBNs and why they are changing Have you ever looked at the back of a book and wondered what the series of numbers above the bar code is for? This is the ISBN, a seemingly random row of ten digits, interspersed with dashes. Want to know more? Of course you do… well, it’s all change in the world of the ISBN and, for those of us in publishing, that’s pretty exciting! | ||||||||
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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.
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| NEWS AND HAPPENINGS | ||||||||
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Prizes | ||||||||
Congratulations to the British Museum, whose book The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus has just won the 2006 Eleanor Tufts award. | ||||||||
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New Releases | ||||||||
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A Corpus of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Pottery from Lincoln
Lincoln was the centre for a large Medieval pottery industry which flourished from the 9th to the 15th century. Pottery produced in Lincoln was traded over a large part of the east midlands and beyond - even as far as Birka in Sweden. Despite the presence of this local industry, pottery produced in the surrounding areas - such as Torksey, Stamford, Potterhanworth, Toynton and Bolingbroke - accounted for a large share of the pottery used within the city of Lincoln itself. This volume reports on the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval pottery found during various archaeological excavations in the city from 1970 until 1987. The authors present a city-wide pottery classification system and analyse the sequence of pottery types through time and at numerous sites. They make extensive use of petrological analysis, including the study of over 600 thin-sections. These have been used to characterise the local clay and temper sources exploited by Lincoln potters and to identify wares made in the vicinity of the city, those made elsewhere in the county of Lincolnshire, and to identify regional and foreign imports. The volume is arranged by pottery types, illustrated by typical and unusual examples and accompanied by descriptions of their visual appearance, petrological characteristics, source, forms, decoration and dating evidence | |||||||
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The Archaeology of The Upper City and Adjacent Suburbs
This volume contains reports on sites excavated in the upper walled city at Lincoln and adjacent suburbs between 1972 and 1987. The project included large-scale excavations which yielded some stunning finds and revealed considerable information about several periods of the city's history. Each site is described in turn, incorporating stratigraphic, artefactual and environmental information, and the common threads are brought together in a general discussion. The excavators found remains of the defences of the Roman fortress, Roman houses, and the legionary headquarters, whose site was subsequently converted into a civic precinct. There were traces of occupation in the Early Saxon period, while the area outside the west gate has produced more pottery of the Mid-Saxon period (c.650-c.850) than any other in the city. Although there was renewed activity from the 10th century, full urbanisation of the upper city may not have happened until the late 11th century. There were already several churches before the Cathedral was begun in 1072, and the sequence of that at St Paul in the Bail is set out in detail. Several smaller excavations provided evidence for industrial activities such as malting, quarrying, and bell casting. Structural and artefactual evidence for the post-medieval period also give a flavour of the local life-style in the 16th-18th centuries. | |||||||
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Book News 67A new year means a new Book News, and for this first issue of 2006 we are introducing a larger, more colourful catalogue. We hope that this new and improved version of the much-loved original will be just as useful, if not more so, than its predecessor.This has just been mailed out so if you didn’t get one but would like a copy, please get in touch.
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Conferences we will be attending TRAC: The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference |
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