Marc Oxenham

Biography

Marc F Oxenham was awarded a British Academy Global Professorship, which he has taken up in the School of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, 2020 and 2024.

He is also a Professor of Bioarchaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University. He received his PhD from the Charles Darwin University in 2001. He has held positions at Colorado College, USA, and the ANU. President of the Australasian Society of Human Biology (2012-14), Australian Future Fellow (2013-17), elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (2011) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2016). Since 2009, he has acted as a consultant for the Unrecovered War Casualties Unit-Army (Australian Department of Defence) in which capacity he has searched for, recovered and identified defence force personnel from conflicts ranging from WWI to the Vietnam War, in France, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and northern Australia. In 2018 he was awarded a Silver Commendation by the Deputy Chief of Army in recognition of this work.

He has undertaken archaeological and/or bioanthropological research in Japan, China, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Research specialisations include: reconstruction of health from human skeletal and dental remains, mortuary archaeology, and human identification and estimation of the time since death in forensic anthropological contexts. He is best known as a bioarchaeologist, focusing on human biological and socio-cultural adaptation to climate and technological variability/change in Holocene Southeast Asia.