 | Pit G | Beginning in season 7, Woolley excavated a series of pits within the Royal Cemetery. He had already cut this area down about 10 meters from the surface, so it was an ideal location to go deeper to investigate the earliest occupation of the site. The only map of the location of these pits that Woolley published is found in Ur Excavations volume 4 in 1955, but it is demonstrably unreliable. Combining information from the field notes, the UE4 plan, and the UE4 stratigraphic profile helps to get closer to the actual sizes and locations, but most of these cannot be taken as exact.
Pit G was the largest of the pits dug in the Royal Cemetery in season 7 (larger were dug in seasons 11 and 12). It was located northwest of PG/777. The stratigraphic profile shows it as being 10 meters from NW-SE, but an early reference in the Antiquaries Journal for 1929 states that it was laid out as being 14x4 meters. It may have been conceived of as two pits, however, as the same reference mentions one pit on the outer line of a retaining wall [of the early temenos?] and a smaller on the inner line. Together they are later referred to as Pit G, or the smaller one may have been abandoned and only the 10 meter extent of Pit G reported.
The pit was on the northwestern outskirts of the Royal Cemetery and it uncovered some building remains. In fact, walls were not unusual in the Royal Cemetery as witnessed by this quote from UE4, p.70: "Over a large part of the Cemetery area there extended walls of plano-convex mud bricks, at two distinct levels... All were thin and flimsy, all much destroyed by the diggers of the Cemetery graves." Woolley felt that these were just store rooms of a temporary nature.
The pits dug in the Royal Cemetery in season 7 were intended to test the lower levels and little if anything was collected from them. Pit G, however, appears to have been a prelude to Pit F and may have initially been conceived of as Pit F in the sequence. Pottery was collected from it and analyzed by Henri Frankfort in Antiquaries Journal volume 9. Initial mentions of the pit indicate it was to go to the lowest levels, but it only reached 7.5 meters above sea level. It also began at a much higher point than other trenches, at 14.5 above sea level. Woolley must have realized he needed a much larger pit to achieve his goals and began that as PFT in the next season. The shift from this pit to the much larger is likely the origin of Legrain's listing of separate PF and PFT contexts, and the beginning of Woolley's realization that he must rename the entire sequence of pits at Ur. | (none) |