The seventh campaign of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania at Ur started on October 24 1928, and continued until the end of February 1929. The Staff consisted of my wife, Mr. M. E. L. Mallowan, general assistant, and the Rev. E. Burrows, S.J., as epigraphist. Mr. Mallowan was detained in England by illness and did not join us in the field until early in December, up to which time my wife, in addition to doing all the drawings, was my sole field assistant, and subsequently continued to share with me the whole of the cemetery work of the season. The excavation of the graveyard area kept us busy during the greater part of the winter, and we dug 454 graves in all. By the end of January the area proposed for the current year had been exhausted, and attention was devoted to the strata underlying and bordering on the graveyard. It was this work that led to the discoveries connected with the Flood. On Mr. Mallowan's arrival more men were enrolled and set to work on the courtyard of the great Nannar Temple. By the middle of February this task also was completed, and finally, for the last ten days of the season, both gangs were drafted off for experimental work on the city walls of Ur. The results of the season therefore fall under four headings:

I. The Cemetery.

II. The buildings and rubbish-mounds of the pre-cemetery town and the evidence for the Flood.

III. The Nannar Temple.

IV. The Town Walls.

While the astounding work in the cemetery of Ur continues, Mr. Woolley has embarked on yet another investigation which, though less spectacular, is nevertheless of great scientific importance. An attempt has been made to obtain direct stratigra-phical evidence as to the succession of early civilizations in Mesopotamia and of their connexion with the earliest remains which are definitely Sumerian. Till now these problems have only found provisional solutions in a co-ordination of the discoveries made on several sites by means of more or less complicated cross-datings. Whether the new attempt will succeed is, of course, dependent on factors beyond the excavator's control, for the work has only just begun. But I comply gladly with Mr. Woolley's request to add now some remarks on the pottery recovered in the pits, because these discoveries illustrate once more the necessity of a change in method in discussing this kind of material. It is not only that the time of comfortable generalizations is past; the fact has to be faced that the rapid increase of our material during recent years makes terminology as well as theories obsolete almost as soon as they are put forward. The result threatens to be chaos; but the cure is not a merely sceptical attitude, such as that adopted in some recent histories, where the possibility of deriving anything from ceramic evidence at all seems to be doubted.

The growth of interest in archaeological research, of which our own times afford so many proofs, has the double advantage of assuring recognition of such additions to knowledge as may from time to time be made, and of emphasizing the need to fill the gaps which the increase of knowledge only serves more clearly to define. While it would be unreasonable to look for the solution of most of the outstanding problems of archaeology in the near future, it is evident that a clear conception of the most profitable lines of inquiry is essential to any progress.

From a chronological point of view the pottery may be divided into three sections:

A 1: The ditch under E. hypocaust and corridor.

A 2: The deposit S. of the bath.

B: The corridor below the pavement level.

C: The corridor above the pavement level and Rooms V, VIII, IX, X, XI.

In August 1928 Mr. W. Cubbon and Mr. J. R. Bruce, at the request of the Manx Museum, examined a mound about a mile west-north-west of the town of Ramsey. This had been raised on a gravel bank at the eastern end of what was formerly Loch Mallow. Though inconspicuous, it had long been known, and as early as the thirteenth century was noted as a landmark between the Lord's lands and the Abbey lands in the parish of Lezayre, being referred to by name as Leabba AuKonalhay, i. e. grave of O'Conoly.