We now have been surveying for just over three weeks. We have been out in the fields walking every day (when you have a short field season and potential weather troubles, it is hard to stay inside and take time off when the skies are clear). Fortunately, the weather here has been for the most part cooperative: relatively warm for December (in the 40's), mostly clear, occasionally overcast, with no significant precipitation since we began. On two days, it drizzled for brief periods but never for long enough to be a major problem. As a consequence, we have covered a lot of ground.

We found a number of large sites during the first days after we started. But then, for about the next ten or fifteen days, we only found a few small scatters of pottery on the ground and especially few Longshan (Late Neolithic) sites. In terms of our research, not finding very much is as important as coming across sizable ancient settlements, albeit not as much fun. Areas with no sites tell us where people did not settle, which is important for understanding the entire settlement pattern over a large region. It helps us come to grips with the reasons why people lived where they did and why distributions of communities shift in location from one phase to the next. These are key bits of information needed to understand the long-term history of the region.

An alternative interpretive perspective might claim that when we find few sites it instead reflects post-occupational depositional issues, such as that the ancient sites in a given sector were more apt to be covered by alluvial sediments due to flooding over the past few thousand years. Such alluviation might hide sites from the surface and our view. Yet I believe that such depositional factors are not the best explanation for our sectors of sparse settlement. In general, when we do not find sites, we usually are distant from large rivers and river channels. In point of fact, areas well removed from watercourses are just the places where alluvial deposition would have been more sporadic (if it took place at all) and so less of a current problem for obscuring sites. These areas away from major rivers also tend to have fewer contemporary settlements (villages), which provides some support for the low levels of occupation that we are recording for the deeper past. In contrast, over the past week, our survey coverage has moved to places close to major waterways, and we have found a great deal, including a one of the ten largest (about 100 hectares) Longshan sites in our entire study region near the village of Jing Gou ("well ditch"). Where we are now is just where alluvial deposits should be most obscuring, and yet with careful systematic survey, we continue to find one site after another.

I do not mean to give the impression that the long history of Chinese river flooding is without consequence for our recording of sites. It likely represents one of at least three reasons why it is more difficult to see the surface residues of past settlements in the Rizhao area as compared to the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, where I previously surveyed. The other factors are that the sites we are looking for here are older than those in Mexico, and that the Chinese landscape has been intensively modified continuously for millennia since the Longshan era, while relatively few people lived in Oaxaca for the centuries after the Spanish invasion.

At the same time, there is another, more personal implication of not finding many sites. That is, the fewer sites we find, the more we walk and the more ground we cover. Frankly, continuous days of walking many kilometers, across highways and railroad tracks, up and down ridges, and through fields of wet, winter wheat are just a bit more of a physical challenge for me than was the case ten years back. Somehow, I managed to ding something on my left foot, and so I decided to try a Chinese medicinal patch as a remedy. The sticky patches with some kind of herbal medicine soaked into them came in a package with the face of a dog displayed prominently on the wrapper. This seemed a bit curious to me, so I asked. The association is that in the past (it is not clear how far back), such remedies were prepared using dog hide that was laden with herbs, heated, and applied to the sore spot. I tried these patches (minus the dog), and they seemed to help. An effective cure, placebo, natural healing? I am not sure but will take it.

The word of the day is begins with one of my favorite survey foods, and something that we eat each day at lunch, a large (pizza sized) round baked bread, called 'da bing.' Today, baked 'da bing' is largely a rural food, hard to find in Rizhao itself. 'Da' means 'big' and 'bing' means 'round thing.' Another name for 'da bing' in some sectors of our survey area is 'kang bing' with 'kang' meaning 'baked.' I was told that the same character 'kang' (when used as a noun) refers to the traditional Chinese 'bed' that had a fire pit under it. With more and more central heating, such traditional beds are becoming less common, replaced by 'hu chuang' or the kinds of beds more familiar to us. While 'chuang' refers to 'bed,' 'hu' is a reference to 'the west' since such beds came from the west some time (centuries) ago. This same 'hu' also is part of the word for 'carrot' ('hu luobu'). 'Hu' again refers to 'western origin' and 'luobu' is the word for 'radish,' a food which has a longer history in China. The same 'hu' is also part of the word for 'black pepper' or 'hu jiao,' with jiao meaning 'spicy or pepper.'