In the 2022 season of excavations at the ancient city of Ur, we excavated four trenches. Processing this data for publication is a lengthy task, and in order to help, I took on an intern in the Penn Museum summer intern program for 2024.

The program ran from Jun-Aug 2024 and my assigned intern, Nathaniel Erb from The Catholic University in Washington DC, organized data from Square 6, made maps of the levels, and investigated the time period and possible activities represented in the structure we found there. In order to better understand the artifacts he was seeing in photos and type numbers (all of those artifacts remain in Iraq), I brought a few similar objects from Woolley's excavations up from storage to the study room so that we could get a feel for them, so to speak.

This video covers our discussion about ancient figurines, since two broken examples were found in the trench that Nate was working on. I had him research the types to come to conclusions about time period, manufacture, and how these objects might have been used in the space where we found them.

There is a wide variety of ancient figurines and many theories about their use. We cover some of those, but (spoiler alert?) ultimately admit that there had to be many different uses for these objects in the ancient world.

More objects like these can be seen in the Penn Museum Middle East Galleries, and the paid summer internship program is open to college students from all over, so I encourage those interested to find out more about it and apply.