Artifacts discovered from Leonard Woolley’s excavations of Ur

A wooden box filled with pottery, seeds, and animal bones that may have come from Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations of Ur in the 1920s and ‘30s has been found in the University of Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, in an area slated for a new state-of-the-art radiocarbon dating facility. The items turned out to be the remains of food offerings left in a royal tomb at least 4,500 years ago. “The remaining mystery is how this material came to be at Bristol in the first place. The environmental remains themselves were published in 1978 in Journal of Archaeological Science. The authors of that study were based at the Institute of Archaeology, London, and at the University of Southampton, and none of them had any known connection to the University of Bristol that might explain how the material came to reside here. If anyone can shed light on this mystery, we’d would love to hear from them,” said archaeologist Tamar Hodos. The artifacts will be housed at the British Museum, one of the sponsors of the original excavation.