We have arrived at the last day of 2004, and this should be our last full day in China for this season. Tomorrow, we plan to catch the 7:30 am fast train to Beijing, then hop a cab to the Beijing airport, from which we are scheduled to depart for Chicago.

Last Sunday, we traveled over the mountains in the central part of Shandong Province back to the university. Over the last week, Linda and I have been ensconced in a small, yet comfortable, room on the sixth floor of the campus hotel. So much of the gated campus has changed in the decade we have been coming here with new buildings erected and others modernized. When we first arrived at Shandong University in 1995, there was no hotel for guests and visiting scholars. We stayed in the foreign student dorm, which was rather basic. Now, this hotel facility is well used, even busy, reflecting the more outward perspective of higher education here. I suspect that half the structures on this campus today were not present ten years ago. When I taught here just two years ago, we documented large labor gangs tearing down of old dormitories. Now, new campus housing stands in its place, and there is also a modern three story dining hall nearby as well. A campus that served fewer than 10,000 students in the 1980s now houses roughly four times that many.

During this week in Jinan, I taught several workshops on the history, importance, and results of archaeological settlement pattern survey, met with the university's young, innovative President (Zhan Tao), and renewed acquaintances with many old friends. We also found time to walk through the city's quiet downtown park that surrounds a natural hot spring. The weather here has been cold so we did not get out and around as much we might have liked, but it is clear from what we did see that this city, like so much of China is undergoing very rapid change with new roads, new constructions, and modernizing services. The number of private cars is skyrocketing. One thing that has changed very little over a decade is the novelty of westerners on the streets, and still wherever we did go (especially outside of the university grounds), we attracted stares and surprise.

This will be the last email for our tenth season in China. We walked over more ground than in any prior year, except for year four (1998) when we surveyed for over six weeks. I hope that you enjoyed these dispatches and hope to speak with many of you in person or by email soon.

The word of the day is "zaijian" or 'goodbye.' The two characters in this word literally mean something like "again" and "see" so we hope to see you again in the future.