Dr Toby Martin

Profile details

 

Assistant Director (Award-Bearing and Accredited)​

Biography

Dr Toby Martin (PhD, FSA, SFHEA) is Assistant Director (Award-Bearing and Accredited) at Oxford Lifelong Learning, responsible for undergraduate and postgraduate academic provision across all subject areas, as well for online and in-person accredited and unaccredited short courses. 

Toby joined the department in 2018, having completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield, and subsequently working as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow and Departmental Lecturer at Oxford University’s School of Archaeology. During his career Toby has also worked in developer-funded archaeology as an academic advisor, researcher, specialist consultant, and fieldworker.

Toby is also the editor of Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, a council member for the Society for Medieval Archaeology, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

Toby’s research focuses on the archaeology of the earliest part of the medieval period between the fifth and seventh centuries CE. His specialism encompasses material culture, art history and burial archaeology, and particularly the relationship between people, objects and images across Europe in the centuries following the disintegration of Roman imperial rule. Toby is an active researcher and has published works on social archaeology, material culture studies, materials analysis, network analysis and results from archaeological excavations.

DPhil supervision

Toby has three DPhil students supervised and co-supervised across Oxford Lifelong Learning, the School of Archaeology and the History Faculty, and is happy to discuss supervising topics in early medieval archaeology, particularly regarding material culture and burial archaeology.

Publications

Monographs

Ladd, S. and Martin, T. F. (in press). The Roman and Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries at Hatherdene Close, Cherry Hinton, Cambridge. East Anglian Archaeology.

Allen, T. and Martin, T. F. 2021. The Castle Hill Brickworks and Somerhill Estate. Oxford Archaeology Monograph 33. Oxford: Oxford Archaeology. Available open-access from Oxford Archaeology.

Martin, T. F. 2015. The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.

Edited volumes

Martin, T. F. and Sayer, D. (eds, in preparation). Current Perspectives on Early Medieval Migration. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monographs.

Martin, T. F. with Morrison, W. (eds) 2020. Barbaric Splendour: The Use of Image Before and After Rome. Oxford: Archaeopress. Open-access, available online from Archaeopress.

Martin, T. F. and Weetch, R. (eds) 2017. Dress and Society: Contributions from Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Journal articles

Martin, T.F. and Ponting, M. 2025. ‘Quality from Kent: preliminary results from the analysis of fifth- to seventh-century silver alloys’. Archaeometry (early view). https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.13092.

Martin, T. F. 2020. ‘Casting the net wider: network approaches to artefact variation in post-Roman Europe’. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 27, 861-886. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09441-x

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

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

Martin, T. F. 2013. ‘Women, knowledge and power: the iconography of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 18, 1-17.

Book chapters

Martin, T. F. (in press) ‘The North Sea and Baltic worlds’, in Aimone, M. (ed.) The Wyvern Collection V: Byzantine and Early Medieval Jewels and Insignia (London and New York: Thames and Hudson)

Hamerow, H., Harrison, S., Kershaw, J., Martin, T.F. (in press). ‘England and Scandinavia between the fifth to eighth centuries’, in L. Hedeager, K. Kristiansen and C. Presctt (eds) Oxford Handbook of Scandinavian Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Martin, T. F. 2021. ‘Everyday objects’, in Lund, J. and Semple, S. (eds) Cultural History of Medieval Objects (London: Bloomsbury).

Martin, T. F. 2020. “Barbaric Tendencies? Iron Age and Early Medieval Art in Comparison.” In Martin, T. F. and Morrison, W. (eds) Barbaric Splendour: The Use of Image Before and After Rome (Oxford: Archaeopress), 1–17. 

Simmonds, A., Bashford, R., Pickard, C., Martin, T. F., Brown, R. and Welsh, K.) 2020. ‘Roman settlement and the north-eastern civil war defences of Oxford: investigations at Mansfield College and the Tinbergen Building’. In Dodd, A., Mileson, S. and Webley, L. (eds) The Archaeology of Oxford in the 21st Century: Investigations in the City by Oxford Archaeology, 2006-16 (Woodbridge, 2021), 433–47.

Martin, T. F. 2016. ‘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 AD 500–1700: A Multidisciplinary Future for Biography (Farnham: Ashgate Press), 67-87.

Martin, T. F. 2014. ‘(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: Current Approaches to Artefacts in Archaeology (Oxford: Archaeopress), 27-38.

Martin, T. F. 2012. ‘Riveting biographies: the repair, re-use and modification of early Anglo-Saxon brooches’, in B. Jervis and A. Kyle (eds.) Make do and Mend: Archaeologies of Compromise, Repair and Reuse, (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 2408), 59-73.