Procedures and Finds
Workers were divided according to task: pick men and shovel men for bulk clearing, basket men for carting away material, and the skilled knife men for carefully exposing artifacts on the building floors using knives as the equivalent of modern archaelogical trowels. Distinguishing the ancient mudbrick walls from the surrounding soil, which was largely composed of decayed mudbrick from the same walls, also required the skilled eye of the tracers.
Only a handful of staff supervised the large workforce. Starr hoped to not regularly exceed 125 workers: “That is about the maximum that two men can handle and since the burden of the fieldwork falls primarily on me I do not care to take much more than twice as much as I can handle.”  Many archaeological excavations today keep the staff-to-worker ratio below 10:1. Given the size of the expedition and the amount of work, it is not surprising that the overburdened staff were able to jot down only cursory notes for each day’s excavation. Pfeiffer’s field book for the entire six months of the 1928–29 season, covering all the excavated areas, totaled only 54 pages, including his anecdotes about camp life and the weather. Often all that supervisors had time for in the field was listing the rooms being cleared, noting a few finds, and occasionally sketching some detail of note. A separate log was kept to list the artifacts and the rooms they were recovered from.
In 1929 Starr introduced the grid system to the excavation. Previously each new room was numbered sequentially as it was found, which could be anywhere on the site. The grid plan, which divided the mound into 25 uniquely lettered squares of 50 square meters, facilitated the quick location of rooms. Each new room was then numbered sequentially under a square grid designation within each of the 25 lettered squares. (See the settlement maps to view an example of the gridded plan.) In addition, Starr purchased a light rail system to speed up the transport of the loose, excavated soil to the soil dump at the edge of the mound.
Most artifacts of intrinsic or artistic value seem to have been removed from the site in antiquity. Regardless, the discovery of even a mundane item generated excitement. “It doesn’t take much to please such simple minded people as ourselves,” noted Starr. “A few good walls or a cylinder seal fills our hearts with joy, and today we went into raptures over the uncovering of an ancient toilet.”
The expedition staff spent months excavating domestic structures, and so the uncovering of a temple, with the potential for spectacular finds, generated considerable interest. Starr enthusiastically reported on the discovery of the temple and one of its most fantastic finds, the glazed lion that graces the top of our Web pages:
“Its condition is perfect except for a few minor scratches. ... Artistically it is a magnificent thing. Throughout it is done with the utmost simplicity, showing neither the decadent elaboration of some of the Assyrian things nor the grotesqueness of the more primitive Sumerians. It is conventionalized and yet is not a convention, and lifelike yet not studied. I am so enthusiastic about it that I am afraid that I am a poor one to write an impartial account. ... At present I am spending most of my spare time in cleaning and fixing the surface.”
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