We leave tomorrow for our eighth field season in eastern Shandong Province, China, and as always before we leave, life is beginning to get a bit more hectic than usual with phone calls, emails, last-second meetings, and of course packing. When you go overseas for six weeks, there always is the fear that the things that just happen to fall off the list may not be easily replaced and so the stakes to remember everything you may need are high. Fortunately, I am traveling with my wife and partner, Linda Nicholas, who is an inveterate list maker, and since we do this often, past experience (old lists) serve as a good guide.

Each time I prepare to travel to China, I am struck with a sense of awe. For had anybody asked me 15 years ago whether I even thought that I would ever get to China, even as a tourist, I would have said 'no.' Roughly a decade ago, before we all came to Chicago as staff of The Field Museum, Anne Underhill (a specialist in early China) asked Linda and me if we would like to be part of an international collaboration. Anne was putting together a team that included four professors from Shandong University to conduct research at and around the site of Liangchengzhen, a large Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age site (ca. Late 3rd millennium - early 2nd millennium BC) near the coast in eastern Shandong. Our study area, which is roughly midway between Beijing and Shanghai, is associated with the Late Neolithic Shandong Longshan tradition. That tradition is known for its fine black (reduced fired) pottery as well as other ceramic markers that are rather different from the contemporaneous Late Neolithic pottery found in neighboring Henan Province, closer to the heartland of the Bronze Age Shang Civilization.

Anne and the Shandong professors asked Linda and me to get involved in the Liangchengzhen research as they wanted to begin the international project with a regional archaeological survey at and immediately around this site. Archaeological surveys, which involve the systematic walkover of a landscape looking for the vestiges of past occupations (ancient villages, communities) on the present ground surface, have not been traditionally implemented in China until the last few years. So, when this effort began, Linda and I were invited to help plan, organize, and implement the regional survey, and to help train the Sino-American team in survey procedures. After seven consecutive seasons of winter fieldwork, the collaboration has developed so well that we are readying to begin our eighth trip and survey season. Now, with Anne, Linda, and me at The Field Museum, we have a long-term agreement with Shandong University, and Linda and I will spend the last two weeks of this trip there.

During seven years of regional survey we have found hundreds of sites from the Longshan as well as the subsequent Zhou and Han periods. We have systematically walked over an area of more than 650 square kilometers, defining significant changes in the regional settlement pattern over time. Our work to date has illustrated that Liangchengzhen was an unusually large settlement during the Longshan period, and that it was at the center of a concentration of Longshan communities of different sizes. Previously, no one knew precisely how large Liangchengzhen was, whether Liangchengzhen was an isolated town or part of a string of settlements of roughly comparable size, or how far its hinterland may have spread. This year, we plan primarily to extend our survey region to the southwest (south of the modern city of Rizhao, which is our base of operations) toward another large Neolithic site, Yaowangcheng. Our main goal, which will require this survey season and another to address, is to discover whether Longshan period settlement is continuous between these two large Longshan period sites, or if they were separated by a no man's land or shatter zone. The latter could indicate that Liangchengzhen and Yaowangcheng were centers of separate polities.