Box with materials from ancient city recovered

LONDON — The things you find when you do a good clear out.

Bristol University in Britain learned this when researchers discovered a box containing materials from archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley's dig of the Sumerian city of Ur tucked away on top of a cupboard.

Researchers determined that the 4,500-year-old contents — consisting of pottery, seeds, and animal bones — had come from a tomb at an excavation in Iraq that was jointly sponsored during the 1920s and 1930s by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The materials had been analyzed and described in earlier journals — but no one knows how they ended up in Bristol, which had no part in the dig.

Senior lecturer Tamar Hodos said yesterday it's somewhat like finding a Monet in the attic.