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.

In May 1927 Mr. J. R. Gabriel, of Caerleon, drew my attention to a Roman burial which had just been discovered during building operations in the village of Ultra Pontem, the bridge-head suburb of Caerleon on the southern bank of the Usk. The eastern edge of this village has long been known to impinge upon an extensive Roman cemetery, and fragments of Roman tombstones are still found here from time to time. The new discovery was made some 60 yards east of Yew Tree House and 550 yards east-south-east of the south-east end of the bridge (Ordnance Survey 6-inch map, Mon. XXIX, S.W.), during the digging of a cess-pit for bungalows then under construction on the hill-side south of the Bulmore Road. At a depth of about 2½ feet the southern side of the pit was found to consist largely of a vertical slab of stone, which, as the digging proceeded, fell downwards and disclosed a stone cist containing a lead canister (figs. 1 and 3). The cist and its contents were then left in position until Mr. Gabriel and I had seen and recorded them, and with the consent of the owner of the property (Mrs. Lewis), who rendered every assistance, both cist and canister were removed to the Caerleon Museum.

Looking back seven centuries towards the foundation of Ancient Rome, Livy explained that the interest of the early period was meagre, and that the traditions handed down to his day, though enriched by legendary and even poetic features, lacked reliable proof. He did not feel called upon to question their accuracy, still less to elucidate the origin of the city. He accordingly began his history with the advent of Eneas, and it is only in our day that the vision of history has penetrated far beyond the conventional boundaries which so long satisfied the world. It is the sense of archaeology which leads us to pierce the veil, and our anxiety to reach the most remote civilization is so keen that we may perhaps tend to disregard intervening ages. In my valedictory address to the Society of Antiquaries let me refer to this marked extension of our aspirations and to the notable developments in various directions now taking place here and elsewhere. Reference to our early proceedings will show how much our objectives have changed. Apart from the duty ‘to explode what rested only on the vanity of the inventors and propagators’ (Archaeologia, i, 1770, p. 1), the ‘study of antiquity and history was paramount’ (ibid., p. 2). This still remains our principal aim, though differently interpreted. Antiquity carried a narrower sense than it commands to-day. Robert Vaughan's British Antiquities Revived of 1662 is purely genealogical, and relates to the precedence of early kings of North and South Wales. Hearne's Antiquities embraces shires, parliaments, arms, heraldry, and jurisprudence. Moreover, there was a certain insistence on the national aspects of the past. It was the function of our Society to ‘give attention to discoveries however trifling which may tend to illustrate any point of English history’ (Archaeologia, ix, 1787, p. 1), and for the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century the preponderance of effort was devoted to English studies. To this the chief exception was philology. From the Renaissance onwards learned societies and individuals had looked upon the rescue and publication of early texts as a supreme privilege, and in one form or another linguistic studies remained the fundamental and universally acknowledged basis of scholarship. Our Society did not concern itself with the collection or collation of classical texts, and nobody was charged with the duty of studying the English language in the sense that the French Academy was directed to lay down a code of law for the French tongue, destined at once to be eloquent, untainted, and adapted to the requirements of science and the arts.

Émile Mâle says that medieval Christian art in its last period had lost touch with the great tradition of symbolism which had been so important in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still largely dominated the art of the fourteenth. But there was one great symbolical idea which survived, and that was the harmony of the Old and New Testaments; and so we find among the most popular subjects of fifteenth-century Church art the concordance of the Apostles and Prophets in the Creed, and the series of parallels between the life of Jesus and episodes of Old Testament history, which were summed up and digested in the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. The reason for the popularity of these subjects was, no doubt, their didactic value, and though Mâle does not develop this side of the subject, we may say that one, though not the only, characteristic of the religious art of the fifteenth century was that, instead of being symbolical, it became didactic. We find in this period a whole series of subjects which reduced the articles of Christian faith and practice to pictorial form, and seem to have been intended to illustrate the medieval catechism by which the teaching of the Church was imparted.

The bronze forepart of an ibex (pls. xv, xvi), now in the collection of our Fellow Mr. Oscar Raphael, was previously in the Paytel collection. M. Paytel originally bought it in Cairo about thirty years ago, and it is known to have been ultimately obtained from a man who had brought it from Mesopotamia. This history may be regarded as reliable, and an Egyptian provenance is thereby rendered unlikely.

During the early part of this year (1928) Mr. Maurice Sainty, son of Mr. J. E. Sainty of Norwich, found lying upon the upper portion of the beach at Sidestrand, Norfolk, the Acheulean hand-axe here described (fig. 1). The specimen, of which one edge is twisted, while the other exhibits a zig-zag outline, is coloured a rich tawny brown, and shows upon its surfaces cherty patches which have resisted patination and staining. The implement cannot have been long upon the beach before being found, as it does not exhibit any marked signs of rolling such as are prevalent upon stones subjected to wave-action.

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.

In the course of the archaeological investigations of the Cromer Forest Bed I am carrying out under the auspices of the Percy Sladen Fund, I found, during 1927, the Chellean handaxe here described (figs. 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, and 1d). The specimen was lying upon the foreshore at West Runton, where, at low water, a very extensive spread of flints is exposed resting upon the chalk. There is no doubt. that the vast bulk of these stones has been derived, as at Cromer, East Runton, and elsewhere, from the slow disintegration, by sea-action, of a highly ferruginous deposit which, at many places along the Norfolk coast, can be seen lying at the base of the Forest Bed. The specimen now to be described, like so many others found upon the foreshore sites mentioned, exhibits a patination in every way comparable with that of certain flint implements and flakes discovered in place in the ferruginous deposit alluded to, and was, without question, derived from it. The colour of the flint is a light chestnut brown, in places ochreous, with large areas of speckled purple—a combination of shades which, to those who are familiar with the flints in the base of the Forest Bed, makes it clear that any stone so patinated and found upon the north-east coast of Norfolk, came from this accumulation.

The excavation of Roman Alchester, begun in 1925—6 under the auspices of the Oxford branch of the Classical Association, was continued for nearly four weeks during August and September, 1927. The object of this year's work being to discover something of the plan and lay-out of the town in its successive periods, the region selected for this purpose was the vicinity of the east gateway of the town, and several points along the line of the rampart between that and the north-east corner mound.

Excavations on this site, which has a frontage of 130 feet on the west side of Princes Street, beginning 110 feet north of Mansion House Street, were watched from January 1928 by Mr. Quintin Waddington of the Guildhall Museum, and from September 1928 until the close of excavation in January 1929, by the present writer also. Digging usually proceeded in narrow shafts, the sides of which were boarded up as the work went on, whilst the use of day and night shifts made progress rapid, so that it was only possible to obtain occasional and incomplete views of stratified matter. However, it proved possible to make periodical examinations of the pottery from a number of separate shafts; and a limited amount of trial excavation during the men's dinner-hour was also carried out.

It is now seven years since my paper on this subject appeared in Archaeologia. I now have to add an account of certain discoveries which excavation and the stripping of modern plaster from the walls of the transepts have disclosed, together with some notes on the tower and the bells. I have already shown in Archaeologia that Roger de Berkeley, the second of that name and of the more ancient stock, had founded this priory for Austin canons in or about the year 1125, and how and why in 1146 his son and successor Roger had granted it to the Benedictine monks of Gloucester, so that from that date it ranked merely as a Benedictine cell.

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.

Until a comparatively late date in the history of London appliances for dealing with outbreaks of fire were very primitive. Barrels of water kept outside the larger houses in summer or times of drought, ladders, and strong crooks of iron with cords and chains attached to pull down burning buildings, were the only means available to extinguish a fire.

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.

The very interesting limestone plaque from Ur, illustrated in pl. v of vol. viii of The Antiquaries Journal, deserves a little more attention than Mr. Woolley has had space to give to it. In design this chariot exactly resembles a number of pottery models that were found in the season 1923–4 at Kish and provisionally dated 3000 B.C. or a little earlier. I note that Mr. Woolley is of opinion that his plaque can be dated 3200 B.C.

Among the heirlooms of the Boughey family at Aqualate Hall, Forton, Staffordshire (close to the eastern boundary of Shropshire), are two small bowls, originally joined as one vessel, which have been inventoried as ‘Roman Pottery’. Mrs. John Morris, who has recently inherited the property, remembers them from her childhood, and was always given to understand that they were found in draining the swamps that lie to the north of Aqualate Mere and west of Thistleyfield Coppice, in the time of her grandfather, Sir Thomas Boughey, Bart., some seventy years ago, when trenches full of bones, armour, and (reputed) Roman pottery were discovered. Most of the finds were kept in an outhouse, but the two pots were preserved in a cabinet in the Hall, together with a big dagger, the blade much corroded; Mrs. Morris thought it was of iron with a brass or bronze handle; unfortunately, it has now vanished and all the other objects are lost with the exception of the twin bowls. These Mrs. Morris most kindly allowed me to study and sketch in June 1928.

The implements described in this note have an important bearing upon the antiquity of man, and were derived, respectively, from the Suffolk Bone Bed, beneath the Red Crag, the Cromer Forest Bed of Norfolk, and the Upper Chalky Boulder-Clay of the Ipswich district.

In March 1926, workmen engaged on the erection of a garage for Mr. S. Cooper in Cypress Road, Shide, a suburb of Newport, Isle of Wight, exposed a portion of tessellated pavement. Advised of this find, as local secretary, I visited the site and with the consent of the owner stopped further operations pending decision as to future development. Without delay a committee of investigation was formed, excavation was decided on, and I was asked to undertake the supervision of the work.

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.

The exact course of the Roman road called Akeman Street in the neighbourhood of the river Cherwell, some 9 miles north of Oxford, for a distance of a little over a mile, has long remained uncertain. The road is traceable from the west as far as the south-east corner of Tackley Park, and from the east as far as the north-west corner of Kirtlington Park. Between these two fixed points the road is, conjecturally, marked on the Ordnance Survey map merely by two parallel dotted straight lines, drawn with the aid of a ruler.