Excavations at Ur, 1926–7. Part II

During the second part of the season 1926–7 the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania was engaged in excavating a cemetery, or rather cemeteries, lying inside the temenos wall and at the south-east end of the enclosure. In 1922, during the early days of our first season at Ur, we had dug here a trial trench of no great depth and had found several groups of pottery and some jewellery which, owing to its nearness to the surface, I had assumed to be of late date (see Ant. Journal , vol. iii (1923), pi. xxix). Work of this sort, however, could not be done satisfactorily with the absolutely untrained gang which we had just enrolled, and the discovery of the temple E-Nun-Mah in another part of the temenos enabled me to abandon what the men named ‘the Gold Trench’. Now, after four years, the time had come to complete the topography of the temenos by clearing up what was the only large area within its walls still untested. The negative results of our original trench—negative so far as walls were concerned— and the evident denudation of the site, did not inspire confidence, but the ground had to be proved, and there was at least the prospect of further discoveries of small objects

Ancient history · Archaeology · Denudation · Excavation · Geography · Pottery · Trench · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Geology · History · Paleontology

• Negotiating Evidence

  Open Access•Sudeshna Guha•Modern Asian Studies•2005

  Add to list

• Human sacrifice and intentional corpse preservation in the Royal Cemetery of Ur

  Open Access•Aubrey Baadsgaard, Janet Monge et al.•Antiquity•2011

  Add to list