In 1905, John Garstang held a concession to dig at Hierakonpolis on behalf of the Liverpool University Excavations Committee. He published a brief report, which described further excavations within the temple and town enclosure of Nekhen, following  those of Quibell and Green (1900 and 1902). During his first season the ground had been too hard to continue work in the town site, so he turned his attention to the area of the mud brick "Fort" (on the north side of the entrance to the Great ~'Vadi, or AbulSuffian. Within the Fort he excavated a Predynastic cemetery of some 188 graves, but only illustrated and mentioned a few of the artifacts from them in his preliminary report. In the second season at the site, Harold Jones continued the trench in the temple area at the town site of Nekhen, finding, among other objects, the head of the lapis lazuli figure (Ash.El057) which had been discovered by Quibell in 1898, and Garstang went further south to dig and survey. There are unpublished miscellaneous objects from the work of Garstang and Jones at Nekhen in Liverpool, in both the University and Merseyside collections, the most notable being an ivory tube in the latter museum with the incised depiction of an early shrine, published by a former Keeper. This
present work concentrates on the objects from the Predynastic cemetery beneath the Fort.