I am sitting writing this message in my hotel room in Rizhao on Christmas afternoon. It was almost exactly ten years ago that we first arrived in this coastal town, which was a lot smaller and quieter then than it is now. This year, having arrived in November, we will leave Rizhao tomorrow, the 26th. Anne will start her trip back to Chicago by taking the train to Beijing, while Linda and I along with Fang Hui and the two graduate students will travel to Jinan, the province capital and the home of Shandong University. In Jinan, Linda and I will teach a workshop on archaeological survey for a week before we begin our journey back to North America.

A decade ago, right after Christmas we took a bus tour to visit four Longshan period sites, Liang Cheng Zhen, Dong Hai Yu, Yao Wang Cheng, and Xiao Dai Tuan, that were known to our colleagues and local museum officials. We had to make the decision as to which of these four locations would be the starting point for our regional survey. Unanimously, we chose Liang Cheng Zhen, which already had seen excavations in the 1920s and where our team dug, under Anne's direction, a few years back. In the eighth year of our collaborative project, we finally reached the much smaller coastal site of Dong Hai Yu and surveyed it. Last year, we made it to Yao Wang Cheng, which turned out to be even larger in size than Liang Cheng Zhen, and now this year, our pedestrian coverage engulfed Xiao Dai Tuan. Although the tabulations are not final, we covered roughly 110 square kilometers by foot this year. As a result, our contiguous survey region now encompasses around 940-950 square kilometers, about one-fifth the size of the Rizhao administrative district, so we still have plenty of work laid out for us (and hopefully future generations). On the other hand, this coastal zone of China is developing and changing extremely quickly so archaeologists may not have that much time.

After ten years of anticipation, surveying Xiao Dai Tuan, which almost borders the huge reservoir that services Rizhao with its water, turned out to be just a bit anticlimactic. Although the archaeological site had a rich site core with lots of Longshan period pottery on the ground (we also collected several polished stone tools), we found it be only about 30 hectares in size, much smaller than Liang Cheng Zhen or Yao Wang Cheng, which both measure over 200 hectares. In addition, we reached Xiao Dai Tuan just a week after spending several days walking over another nearby Longshan era site (Jing Gou), which we recorded as much larger (over 100 hectares). Although the Jing Gou site also was previously known to local archaeologists, no one had any notion that it was as big as our study showed it to be. For our part, after Jing Gou, Xiao Dai Tuan seemed a bit small. Yet during the first weeks of December when the Longshan period sites, and even potsherds, were few and far between, we would have relished in mapping and collecting a site the size and nature of Xiao Dai Tuan.

Perhaps, the weather also had a role. On the afternoon that we reached Xiao Dai Tuan, the Siberian express, a wicked north wind, began to gust. The clouds grayed, the temperature plummeted, and our mild winter quickly changed its face. I surveyed the site with my red wool scarf wrapped around my neck and chin, reluctantly taking my hands out of my pockets and gloves in order to collect surface artifacts. Two afternoons later, as we finished some of the hills not far from Xiao Dai Tuan, it began to flurry late in the afternoon. Once it started to stick on the ground, we sloshed through our last pass, and we pretty much all took it as a cue that it was time to turn our attention to map work and artifact analysis. The latter has been our focus for the past few days, along with a few banquets. Surveying in such frosty conditions was once an unimaginable prospect as my settlement pattern experience began in the dry warmth of Oaxaca, where a parched throat was far more the issue than frozen hands and a wet nose. But, after ten years, I have become used to winter survey, just as I have become somewhat accustomed to a lower key December holiday season.

The word of the day is "zhong mian bao che," which refers to the mid-sized van that will take five of us inland from coastal Rizhao across Shandong's mountains to North China's central plain, and Jinan. "Zhong" means 'middle' or 'middle sized.' It is the same character as in "Zhong Guo," China ('middle' 'kingdom'). "Che" is the word for 'vehicle.' "Mian bao" means 'bread loaf,' so a "mian bao che" is a 'bread loaf shaped vehicle' or a 'van.' To break it down even further, "mian" is the word for 'flour,' while "bao" is 'with shape or form' or 'circular,' together referring to 'bread.'