Social:British Archaeological Reports

The British Archaeological Reports Series contains over 3500 books of academic archaeological research, including monographs, excavation reports, revised theses and conference proceedings. Founded in 1974, the BAR series is the largest series of academic archaeology in the world, covering all major aspects of academic archaeology worldwide.

The company that publishes the series, BAR Publishing (trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd), is an independent publisher that, from the outset, has been dedicated to academic archaeology and to publishing original work.

The BAR Series consists of the International series and the British series.

The founders, Anthony Hands and David Walker, started the publishing business when, in the late 1960s, they were unable to publish the site reports of their own archaeological dig, Shakenoak Roman Villla in Oxfordshire. The prohibitive cost of printing in Britain at that time, and the lack of specialist publishers willing to publish archaeological site reports, meant that Hands, Walker and their colleague Conant Brodribb ended up self publishing. This involved buying a commercial printing machine and undertaking the full production of their own books. Indeed, up until 1989 all BARs were printed by Hands and Walker on their own printer, and collated, stapled and guillotined in-house.

Hands and Walker wanted to include in the BAR series archaeology from areas of the world which had previously been unable to get their research out to an international audience. It was not an easy task to reach the key archaeologists in countries such as Russia, the far eastern USSR, the communist countries of eastern Europe, Spain under Franco, and involved long slow postal communications in a wide variety of languages. However, the results were effective and for the first time the archaeology of these countries became easily available in the west. The archaeology of the rest of Europe, the Americas, Australia, Asia etc. was also included.

The BAR series has always been published in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, the main languages of archaeology. The books are also on occasion published in other languages, with a full English translation.

From 1991, the BAR series was published jointly by Tempvs Reparatvm with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd and Hadrian Books. Archaeopress and the archaeologists John and Erica Hedges later took over publication of BAR until 2015, when publication reverted to BAR.

Reception

Sebastian Rahtz, writing in 1994, states that "BAR made an important contribution to archaeological computing in the UK", through publishing the Computer Applications in Archaeology conferences. He also notes that BAR at this period struggled to cover developing countries, "pioneered uncritical publication of 'data'" and did not resolve the "intractable" problem of the speed of publication.

Further reading

• Davison, David, and Henig, Martiin (1996) British Archaeological Reports: Past, Present, and Future: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Oxford in June 1994 to Mark the Twentieth Anniversary of BAR (British Archaeological Reports)