 | Pit W | Pit W was excavated from the bottom of area PG near Pits Y and Z in order to more fully explore the Seal Impression Strata discovered running across the cemetery. Since these strata contained so many early seals and tablets it was clear that they were essential for dating the graves and for learning more about the administration of the city of Ur. In order to observe the strata more clearly, Pit W was much larger than most exploratory pits in the cemetery region, laid out to be 15x7 meters. It was dug from the northeast side of PG/1631 but its horizontal extents were not mapped and Benati (2015) believes that PG/1631 was mistaken for PG/1648, placing Pit W somewhat farther SE. Its published stratigraphic profile shows that PG/1631 (possibly 1648) was actually somewhere near the middle of the long side of the trench and Woolley states that Pit W was placed so as to virtually fill the gap between Pits Y and Z, but was set a few meters northeast of them. This allows for a relatively accurate placement of the pit.
Pit W quickly ran through the seal impression strata but Woolley continued it down much farther, as he had with Pits Y and Z, to reach about a meter below sea level. He thus uncovered many graves earlier than the main Royal Cemetery, and because he believed them to be from the Jemdet Nasr period, he began JNG numbers for them. This discovery, combined with early graves in Pit Y, spawned the conception of a Jemdet Nasr cemetery running beneath and south of the Royal Cemetery, and in season 12 Woolley would seek to expose it in Pit X. | (none) |