In our 1949 budget, the Directing Committee of the Institute put at my disposal a sum of one hundred pounds, for the purpose of an excavation in collaboration with the Turkish Department of Antiquities. On discussing the matter with the Director, Dr. Hamit Koşay, I found that the mound in which he was at the moment most interested was near the small modern town of Polatli, about forty miles from Ankara, on the main railway line to Istanbul. I understood from Dr. Koşay that a large part of this mound had been quarried away by peasants in need of earth for making bricks, and that, as a result, a number of whole pots and metal objects of the Copper Age had found their way to Ankara. I was subsequently shown these objects by Bay Nuri Gökçe, Director of the Hittite Museum, and a few days later visited the site in his company.

The hüyük, which takes its name from Polatli (Plate II), is situated on the outskirts of the modern town, near a spring of water. Its height is impressive, though the area which it covers suggests that the ancient settlement which it represents would have been hardly more than a village.

The great interest and importance attaching to the ruins of Harran, particularly in relation to the city's age-old association with the Mesopotamian moon-cult, has never been in doubt. The remarkable degree to which, during the past generation, they have escaped the attention of archaeologists has been due entirely to their geographical inaccessibility. So many references to Harran, either under its own name or in the classical guise of Carrhae, occur throughout the length of Mesopotamian, Roman and mediaeval Arab literature, that it has acquired a strong historical personality, almost without reference to its material remains.

In fact, the few and brief investigations of the site so far accomplished by archaeological explorers, have failed to throw any light whatsoever on the outstandingly important matter of local topography in relation to the several religious shrines for which the city was famous during nearly three millennia. In the middle of the last century, it was successively visited by members of Chesney's Euphrates Expedition and the English missionary, G. P. Badger.

Tell Tabara el Akrad lies about a twenty minute walk east of Atchana: to the north near the main road is Tell Akrad, and to the south the high conical Tell Saluq, now surmounted by a frontier post.

In the Atchana season of Autumn 1948 I visited the site and brought back samples of a hand-made burnished pottery, which was recognised by Sir Leonard Woolley as quite different from anything found either at Atchana or at the neighbouring Chalcolithic site of Tell Esh Sheikh. It therefore seemed desirable to make some investigation of the site in the hope of securing a representative collection of the pottery and establishing its position in the sequence of the plain. But it was already late in the season, and impossible to undertake anything as part of the regular work of the Expedition. For this reason I offered to make a small sounding at my own expense; to which plan Sir Leonard immediately acceded, and gave the fullest support and encouragement, providing equipment and every other facility for the work. Bay Ruhi Tekhan, Director of the Antioch Museum, kindly made all the necessary arrangements; and the sounding was carried out in five days early in December by Bay Baki Ögün and myself with ten men.