Our People

Dr Toby Martin

Fellow, Ordinary Fellow

Departmental Lecturer in Archaeology

Department for Continuing Education

Phd (Sheffield), MSt, BA (Oxon)

Dr Toby Martin is a Departmental Lecturer in Archaeology at the Department for Continuing Education, where he directs the Weekly Class and Day and Weekend Event programmes in Archaeology, Anthropology and Ancient History, and acts as the Commissioning Editor for short online courses in the same subject areas.

He obtained his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology as well as his MSt in European Archaeology from the University of Oxford, and studied for his PhD at the University of Sheffield. Since 2013 Toby has worked as a Research Fellow and a Lecturer at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology. During his career Toby has also worked in developer-funded archaeology both in the field and in post-excavation publication.

Toby’s research focuses on the early medieval period; he is particularly interested in the social role of objects in Europe in the centuries that followed the collapse of Roman imperial rule. He has published widely in this area, looking particularly at subjects such as age, gender and identity, as well as biography and iconography. His monograph The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England looks at the role of dress in the construction of regional and gendered identities during the 5th and 6th centuries, and his edited volume Dress and Society explores cutting-edge approaches to dress items from the archaeological record from the Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. His recent British Academy postdoctoral fellowship investigated the role of jewellery in 5th- to 7th century Europe, particularly with regard to regional and supra-regional networks.

Books

The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell and Brewer, 2015)

Dress and Society: Contributions from Archaeology (Oxbow, 2017, co-edited with R. Weetch)
Articles, book chapters and data

Articles, book chapters and data
Martin, T. F. 2020. ‘Casting the net wider: network approaches to artefact variation in post-Roman Europe. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (not yet assigned an issue). doi:10.1007/s10816-019-09441-x (open access).

Martin, T. F. 2019. ‘A matter of scale: some impediments to broad archaeological perspectives on post-Roman European bow brooches’. Neue Studien our Sachsenforschung 6, 139-146.

Martin, T. F. & Champness, C. 2019. ‘Cultivating the margins: the Roman and early medieval rural landscape of Barton Park, Oxford’. Oxoniensia 84, 217–241. http://oxoniensia.org/oxo_volume.php?vol=84

‘The lives and deaths of people and things: biographical approaches to dress in early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Smith, R. and Watson, G. (eds.) Writing the Lives of People and Things, 67-87 (Ashgate, 2016)

A Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Cruciform Brooches (data-set, Archaeology Data Service, doi: 10.5284/1028833). Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1028833 (2015)

‘(Ad)Dressing the Anglo-Saxon body: corporeal meanings and artefacts in early England’, in Blinkhorn, P. and Cumberpatch, C. (eds.) The Chiming of Crack’d Bells, 27-38 (Archaeopress, 2014).

‘Women, knowledge and power: the iconography of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 18 (2013), 1-17.

‘Riveting biographies: the theoretical implications of early Anglo-Saxon brooch repair, customisation and reuse’, in Jervis, B. and Kyle, A. (eds.) Make-Do and Mend: Archaeologies of Compromise, Repair and Reuse, 53-65 (Archaeopress, 2012).