This is a facsimile reprint of the trail-blazing book by David Oates, originally published by the British Academy in 1968 and out-of-print for too long. It is primarily the report of his survey and excavation of sites in northern Iraq between 1954 and 1958, but it is at the same time a memorial to the great explorer, Sir Aurel Stein, whose pioneer fieldwork on the Roman frontiers in Iraq in 1938-39 provided the initial stimulus. (British School of Archaeology in Iraq 2005)

Tell Brak, ancient Nagar, was one of the most important cities in northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC and a focus of long-distance trade. It was also, for about a century, a provincial capital of the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Agade. This is the second of four volumes on the 1976-93 excavations at Tell Brak. The construction level of Naram-Sin's Palace, discovered by Mallowan in the 1930s, has been used as a point of chronological reference to provide the first well-dated corpus of archaeological material in northern Mesopotamia belonging to the second half of the third millennium. The major Akkadian buildings at Tell Brak are the first well-preserved examples to be discovered at any site, and include a great ceremonial complex and a unique caravanserai that housed the donkey caravans bringing metals from Anatolia. During the ritual closure of these buildings beautiful silver jewellery was deposited, along with numerous copper/bronze tools and the skeletons of some of the caravan donkeys. Specialist reports provide detailed historical, geomorphological, ceramic, faunal, botanical, microstratigraphic and other data.

Like a quirky photographer, David Oates has captured moments from life-funny, ironic wistful, poignant, odd, warm, happy and beautiful-and distilled them into short, evocative poems. David is the author of a previous book of similar poems, "Shifting with my Sandwich Hand," and one of stories and poems, "Night of the Potato." He has worked as a reporter, columnist, photographer, comic-strip writer, teacher, poetry-slam organizer and emcee, and editor and publisher of "Monkey," a magazine of satire and slam poetry. He hosted the public-radio shows "Front Porch Stories" and "Great Apes," and is currently the host and producer of Wordland on WUGA, Athens, GA.

Living in Paris for a winter and a spring and waking each morning to a view of Notre Dame, David Oates is led to revise his life story from one of trudging and occasional woe into one punctuated by nourishing and sometimes unsettling brilliance. In The Mountains of Paris, he offers a technique of reimagining one's life story that might be available to anyone. The present tense of the book takes place during the seasons he spends in Paris, sharing an artist';s residency. It is a rare opportunity to consider what it means to be human, through time-stopping moments with music, art, and deep history. The past tense of the book offers memories that intrude into the bustle of Paris life: a Billy Graham crusade at age thirteen, a mountain pass, a love, a loss. In long years of mountaineering Oates fought the self-loathing which had infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. In The Mountains of Paris, he ascends to a place of wonder through intense, personal narrative encounter with the strangeness of being alive. In his searching, luminous, and inimitable prose, Oates invites readers to share the sense of awe awakened by a Vermeer painting, or the night sky, or the echoing strains of music fading down a Paris street, lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying yet beautiful rightness.

The site of Tell al Rimah lies at the northern edge of the Iraqi Jazirah. It is noted in particular for its elaborately ornamented Old Babylonian temple and its unique evidence for third millennium BC vaulting techniques. The site was occupied throughout the second and third millennia BC and, briefly, during Late Assyrian times. This volume presents the complete repertoire of second and first millennium pottery, together with a summary of the history and stratigraphy of the site. This material, which is both extensive and unusually well dated owing to its association with cuneiform evidence, constitutes by far the largest publication of Middle and Late Bronze Age (Old Babylonian, Mitanni and Middle Assyrian) pottery from Northern Mesopotamia. The book will be a valuable resource of information for sites throughout the region.

An exploration of the ways in which the science of ecology has provided a basis for a contemporary worldview that combines an intuitive sense of wholeness with the validation of scientific truth.