The dawn of 2003 marked the eighth straight New Year's celebration that we have marked in China. Although this past week was still busy, it was a bit less frenetic than the two previous weeks we have spent here. We continue to be treated and shown great hospitality. This week we were hosted for a tour and lunch by the Director (Mr. Lu) of the Shandong Provincial Museum, went along for a New Year's Eve lunch as a new faculty member in the Archaeology Department was interviewed, and were taken to lunch by the Head of the History College (Professor Wang) after meeting the final class for this visit. When we were not at celebratory meals, we were interviewed by the campus newspaper and completed my series of archaeology lectures. Tonight, we will host our colleagues and their families for a last meal together before we leave early tomorrow morning by train for Beijing.

Linda and I also have had some time to walk around Jinan, a city of four million or so, and around campus, where a large number of construction projects are underway. We find so much of the construction fascinating as large labor gangs are thrown at projects that would be carried out with many fewer people and more machines/dynamite in the States. One advantage of the Chinese way is that most of the building materials from the structure being torn down are salvaged and recycled. Roof tiles are detached, passed down by hand, and piled up so that they can be carted away. Iron bars are straightened by hand and saved. Even on the University campus, and in the cold of winter, much of the construction work goes on almost around the clock (16 hours per day).

We decided to have a quiet evening New Year's Eve so that we could complete the survey of the Da Xin Zhuang site early on the morning of January 1. Most of the snow on campus had melted and we hoped that in the fields just north of Jinan, we would be able to see enough to survey. But the snow coverage was much thicker in the countryside, and we could not finish all that we wanted. Nevertheless, we could determine that the site extended across a railroad track and on the other side of a canal, making it larger than archaeologists here had previously believed. The fact that in the alluvium so close to the Central Plain, we can find 3,500 year-old potsherds on the ground surface even with snow cover, makes me even more confident that archaeological surveys could be implemented in many regions of North China. Illustrating and documenting that point has been a key aim of ours since we began our seasons in China years ago.

Tomorrow, we will leave Jinan by train for Beijing, and then we will depart for Chicago soon after. Our days here have been rewarding both for getting to know our colleagues, their families, and the students much better, but also to have greater opportunities to study archaeological sites and collections from throughout Shandong Province. I also feel that we have learned a good deal more about the different institutions (and people) that make up the archaeological community in Shandong Province today. The specific divisions of responsibilities and duties between the University, Museums, Institutes, Cultural Bureaus, and Cultural Relics Bureaus are fascinating to try to unravel. One thing that is clear is that the majority of museums in China (there are several key exceptions especially in Beijing and Shanghai) are much less dependent on or directly concerned with the public (attendance) than are museums in the United States. Yet as with many things, the more we learn about Chinese institutions, food, or even (at a very slow pace) the very basics of the language, the more we realize what we do not understand or still have to learn. That is why, we already have begun to look forward to our ninth season of survey late in 2003!