Marc Oxenham

Biography

Marc F Oxenham is Professor of Bioarchaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. He gained his bioanthropological and archaeological training at the Northern Territory University (Charles Darwin University) where he was awarded a PhD in 2001. He has held teaching and research positions at Colorado College, USA, and the ANU.

He was president of the Australasian Society of Human Biology (2012-14), an Australian Future Fellow (2013-17) and elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2011. Since 2009, he has acted as consultant (pro bono) 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.

Over the past two decades he has undertaken archaeological and/or bioanthropological research in Japan, China, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. His research specialisations include the 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.