Ur Excavations, Volume II: The Royal Cemetery

C. Leonard Woolley's Ur Excavations, Volume II, The Royal Cemetery, published jointly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1934, is Woolley's own final excavation report on the royal tombs he dug at Ur between 1922 and 1934, including the mass burials found alongside Queen Puabi and the grave goods recovered with them. Its strength is that it is the primary excavator's own documentation, the closest record there is to what actually came out of the ground, tomb by tomb. Its limit is that Woolley excavated and published in an era before modern stratigraphic and osteological method, and later archaeologists have revisited his field notes to question some of his own interpretations, particularly around the cause of death of the retainers buried with the royal dead, so a claim about what the mass burials mean rather than what was found should be checked against that later reassessment.