Back in December 1995, when we began our regional settlement pattern survey looking for the surface vestiges of ancient archaeological sites (thousands of years old) in eastern Shandong Province, China, the permissions from the Chinese government only came through days before our scheduled departure. For Linda Nicholas and me, who had spent our archaeological lives working on the ancient civilizations of Mexico, the travel, the trip, and the opportunity to walk the rural landscapes of coastal north China felt like a dream (since we wondered whether we ever would even go to China).

Now, we are embarking on our ninth consecutive year of this international collaborative regional project working with Field Museum Associate Curator Anne Underhill and our colleagues from Shandong University. Over 760 square kilometers of terrain have already been walked over by foot, across each field, through every village, and over rocky spurs, water-logged paddies, and sandy beaches. More than a thousand archaeological sites from the Neolithic era through the Han period (covering roughly 5000-6000 years of time, ca. 5-6000 BC - 200 AD) have been recorded during the past eight years of walking. And yet as I make final preparations and board the plane, the chance to experience China once again still seems a bit unreal (at least given the rare moments we have had this fall to take a deep breath and contemplate).

Less than 55 hours after our giant 777 rose off the tarmac at O'Hare, bound non-stop for Beijing, I was walking a transect on a cloudy, but warm day. We traversed flat agricultural fields south of Rizhao (Shandong, China), the growing coastal city that has been our base of operations during this project in China. We are moving toward the village, Yao Wang Cheng, where we know there was a large Late Neolithic, Longshan period (c. 2600-1900 BC), settlement. We are trying to understand the relationship between that community and the very large Longshan period site of Liangchengzhen, where we started the survey nine years ago. We now have covered most of the area between these two sites, and this year we aim to discover how large ancient Yao Wang Cheng really was, and how did its size compare to Liangchengzhen? How similar or different was its pottery, and what was the history of the site after the Longhshan period? Ultimately, when we are able to integrate this year's finding with earlier data, we will see whether smaller Longshan period sites clustered around Yao Wang Cheng, as they did around Liangchengzhen, and whether there was an uninhabited "shatter zone" or no man's land somewhere between the two sites?

Today, as we walked through the fields, our survey crew was aligned five across. As always, Linda is positioned in the middle, carrying the 1:10,000 topographic map on which we plot all of the surface potsherds from bygone eras that we find. On one end is Dr. Fang Hui, a professor from Shandong University, who just last spring made a key find of inscribed oracle bones during his excavations at the Shang period site of Da Xin Zhuang, across the mountains in western Shandong Province. Between Hui and Linda was Anne, who is the North American China specialist on our team. I walk the other end, so it is up to Hui and me to be able to follow our prior passes back across the landscape. Generally, the five across walk back and forth on the terrain, much as you would move a paint brush across a surface making sure that every part of the surface was covered by the brush but that no spot was painted over. Between Linda and me was our new team member, Ms. Song, a graduate student in archaeology at Shandong University, who is learning our survey methods and practicing her English.

We were able to begin walking the fields so quickly this year because, once in Beijing, we immediately flew early the next morning to Qingdao, the modern port city (also in Shandong Province) made famous today by Tsingtao beer. During all prior years, we had taken the long overnight train from Beijing to Rizhao, which meant an extra day consumed in transit. Anne, who left Chicago earlier than us this year, met us with a driver in Qingdao, and he, at times a bit perilously, drove, in part, on a yet unopened expressway to get us to Rizhao by lunch time. Early the next morning, we were criss-crossing the countryside.