This report really covers the work of two seasons, because that planned for autumn 1980 had to be deferred until March 1981, and this was followed in the autumn of the same year by a rather curtailed spell at the site in October and November. A special vote of thanks is due this year to the State Organization for Antiquities and Heritage under its President, Dr. Muayad Sa'id Damerji, for enabling us to carry on our work despite difficult circumstances. We received the readiest co-operation from the Director-General for the Southern Region, Dr. Abd-as-Sittar al-Azzawi, and we shall remember with gratitude the very real help and friendliness afforded us by Sd. Abd-as-Salam Sim'an and Sd. Abd-ar-Rahman Muhammad Ali as Representatives of the Organization, and by Sd. Muhammad Yahya and his staff at the Diwaniyah Inspectorate. As in former years we are indebted to four institutions for their generous support with funds: The British Academy, The British Museum, The National Geographic Society, Washington D.C., and the Royal Ontario Museum. We thank them again for both the visible financial backing and the moral encouragement implicit therein. For their warm hospitality on several occasions we are also most grateful to the French and British engineers of Dragage (at Shomeli) and GKN (at Diwaniyah), who also gave us material assistance of crucial importance by allowing us to draw fresh water for the camp.

In 1970 Geoffrey Bibby drew attention to a tablet from Ur of c. 1800 B.C. which equates weights on the Dilmun weight standard with those on the standard of Ur. He concluded that the Dilmun weight standard was the same as that used in the Indus Valley, but was puzzled by the inconsistencies in the arithmetic, which he explained by assuming that the merchants took a commission each time the weight was converted from one standard to another, that is a different rate of exchange was used to convert from Dilmun weights than was used to convert from Ur weights. Collation of the tablet in the Iraq Museum, however, has removed the problems in the mathematics and the need for Bibby's elaborate commercial procedures.

The object here published (Plate VI) is a heavy lump of grey stone (diorite or basalt) measuring 40 × 34 × 13 cm, roughly shaped to form a gate socket, and carrying an inscription of Ur-nammu which is apparently hitherto unattested. The owner, who inherited it from her father, reported it to the Keeper of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1978, and at his suggestion the present writer took a photographer from the Museum to inspect the object at her home, where the photographs here published were made. The owner's father, then resident in Baghdad, received the stone as a present from the Turkish Governor of Baghdad in 1918 when he was about to surrender the city to the British forces, but nothing is known of its previous history. It is at present in the Ashmolean Museum on temporary loan.

Work on my publication of the University of Pennsylvania's 1931 soundings at Fara prompted me to look again at the material from the Early Dynastic cemetery at al-‘Ubaid. This study resulted. It attempts to re-define the relative dates of the graves within the al-‘Ubaid cemetery. It also reviews the evidence for the dating of the cemetery as a whole in an effort to establish its position within the Early Dynastic period.

There is an extended discussion of the pottery types found in Sumer in ED II and IIIa. The neglect of this material has recently been highlighted by Professor Adams' survey of the Sumerian “heartland”. One of the most striking problems to emerge from his study is the difficulty of identifying pottery and sites of this period.

A summary report on the last three seasons at Tell Brak presents an opportunity for both my colleagues and myself to offer a tribute to our President, Professor Seton Lloyd, in the year of his eightieth birthday. May he long remain the doyen of Near Eastern archaeologists.

It is a pleasure also to express my gratitude to the institutions which have generously contributed to the cost of the excavations, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the British Academy, the British Museum, and the C. H. W. Johns and Crowther-Beynon funds of Cambridge University. The Director-General of Antiquities and Museums, his staff in Damascus and Aleppo, and his representatives in the field were unfailing in their friendly support and advice. Any credit for the success of our operations must also go in large measure to the staff of the expedition, whom I thank most warmly for their energy and loyalty. They were:

Assistant Directors: Dr. T. A. Holland (1978, 1980) and Mr. David Jeffreys (1981).

Site supervisors: Dr. John Curtis (also registrar); Mr. Peter Dorrell (also photographer); Mr. David Hawkins (also epigraphist and registrar); Dr. Ismail Hijara; Dr. Jonathan Hodgkin; Dr. Alastair Marshall (also surveyor); Mr. Thomas Oates; Dr. Walid Yasin al-Tikriti; Mr. Andrew Tomlinson; Mr. Jonathan Tubb.

Conservators: Mr. James Black; Mrs. Cathy Tubb.

Pottery recording: Dr. Kate Fielden; Dr. Joan Oates (also registrar, photographer); Miss Jenny Oates; Miss Susan Oates.

It is with the greatest pleasure that I dedicate this brief article to Professor Seton Lloyd, an archaeologist of enormous distinction, and one whom I am pleased and honoured to call friend, whose work in Iraq still forms the basis for all prehistoric interpretation.

Well-dated ceramic materials are rare, even in the archaeology of the historic periods in Mesopotamia. In particular the third millennium remains imprecisely documented, especially in the north. It is for this reason that I present here a preliminary report on the pottery from the Late ED III destruction level at Tell Brak. Seldom can pottery of such early provenance be so precisely dated. There can be no doubt that this level represents the initial Agade conquest of the north, and the vessels published here comprise the complete or reconstructable pots found in situ on the floors of major buildings in areas CH and ER destroyed at this time (Pls. VIIIb, IXb, XVIa, b). In both areas many of the vessels contained cereals and other food substances, and it is from these well-stratified deposits that the radiocarbon samples have been obtained.