2018 has been another year of transition in the editorial team at IRAQ. Eleanor Robson stepped down in August, in order to focus on the Nahrein Network and on leading the History Department at University College London. She ably guided us through the handover and indeed edited almost half the articles in the current issue. We owe her enormous thanks and are very happy she will remain on the Editorial Board.
Sincerest thanks are also due to all continuing members of the Editorial Board, Mark Altaweel, Claudia Glatz, Erica Hunter, Dan Lawrence, and Sarah Savant, for their valuable advice and expertise. Our many anonymous peer reviewers are vital to the continued excellence of the journal; we cannot thank them enough for their time and the overwhelmingly constructive advice they provide our authors. Saadi al-Tamimi, with the assistance of Lamia al-Gailani, kindly translated the abstracts of each article into Arabic. CUP team members Olivia Hassall and Craig Baxter keep the production process smooth and efficient. We are most grateful to everyone who has contributed to the success of the journal.
We have recently made some changes to our instructions for submission, to keep the process as streamlined as possible for authors, editors, reviewers, and production team. Please see the new instructions at: https://multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/core/journals/iraq/information/instructions-contributors. As ever, we encourage submissions on the full range of archaeology, history, languages and culture of ancient, medieval and pre-modern Iraq. We allow authors to post the Version of Record of an article on their personal or departmental webpage and Accepted Manuscript copies on institutional repositories at the same time as publication online; these rules are compliant with Green Open Access. We continue to publish in hardcopy in December of each year, with the opportunity for earlier online publication via CUP's First View service.
Authors in this issue represent a strong mix of both younger and more established scholars and an impressive international range. Topics include prehistoric pottery production, Ur III and Neo-Assyrian textual analyses, explorations of the equipment and architecture of ritual, interpretations of relief imagery, applications of archaeological science, and study of the history of archaeological research. We are continuing the revived tradition of offering short descriptions of current archaeological work in Iraq but are struggling to keep up with the exciting and vigorous pace of new projects; please let us know if we have omitted your excavation or survey and you would like to be listed.
