We have now been surveying about a week and my body is beginning to adjust to walking most of the day. Fortunately, the landscape in coastal Shandong Province (near Rizhao) where we are walking is less rugged and a bit more forgiving than the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, where I participated in my first archaeological surveys more than 25 years ago. I say fortunately because my body also was more forgiving back then. During the week that we have been systematically walking over fields, forests, villages, and grazing lands south of Rizhao in coastal Shandong, we have found the surface remnants (generally broken pieces of old pottery) from dozens of archaeological sites. But none of these sites to date have been very large and so we have been able to keep moving/walking and covering a lot of ground.

For those of you who have not read my dispatches before from prior field seasons in China, you may wonder why would archaeologists want to survey largely to recover broken pieces (or sherds) of frequently eroded pottery from the contemporary surface? The answer is that archaeological survey provides researchers with a regional picture of how past settlements were distributed over the landscape, their approximate sizes and general locations, and how those patterns or distributions shifted over time. Why is that significant? Well, think about the present population of the United States, and how it shifted over the course of the twentieth century. One key change over that time has been the relatively rapid growth of population in the south of the country as compared to the north. Not even the most detailed study of the architecture and artifacts over a few blocks of any major American city would clue you into this regional change. Yet the shifting of American demographic center of gravity south had major implications for electoral politics, resource use (e.g., water), even commercial trends (air conditioning), as well as other things. Most archaeological excavations are broadly analogous to a detailed study of a few blocks (or a small part) of one or two major sites. While most well run excavations provide incredibly detailed and valuable information about the past, they are focused in scope and so cannot yield a broad-scale or regional picture of ancient populations. For that you need archaeological survey, and in my opinion, the wider the area covered and the more systematic and consistent the approach, the more significant the data collected are apt to be.

Systematic, full coverage archaeological surveys are fairly new in archaeology - with a time depth of little more than five decades. Yet some scholars have dubbed their implementation the top breakthrough in twentieth century archaeological research (and there have been many). This is because in many parts of the world the implementation of systematic surveys decades ago have greatly helped us understand how and why societies change. Survey findings have helped support, as well as dispel, many long-held ideas regarding why specific civilizations arose. Nevertheless, systematic survey approaches got a late start in Chinese archaeology, and as of the middle of the 1990s, few if any systematic settlement pattern studies had been undertaken in China. When provided the chance by our colleagues, Linda and I relished the opportunity to not only to develop a regional and diachronic settlement picture for an important sector of coastal Shandong but also to encourage systematic foot survey across this country with a rich past. Our project, as well as several others that started in the middle 1990s, illustrated the importance of regional findings for studying past societies and now this methodological tool is being employed by archaeologists in various regions of China.

More specific to our project, we would like to expand our survey coverage south to the next large port area (Lanshan) south of Rizhao. Lanshan, like Rizhao, is growing extremely rapidly, and our team agrees that the sooner we get there to look for sites, the better. Rapid development and road building clearly is hiding and destroying many ancient sites each year. Lanshan also is at the southern edge of what we hope to cover as it stands at both the limits of Shandong Province and at a physiographic or topographic break in the landscape, where the coastal plain stops being circumscribed by ridges of coastal mountains. To the north of Lanshan, going to Rizhao, rocky, low mountains extend down almost to the coast. In surveying near what will become the southern edge of our entire, multi-year study region, we are particularly interested in the settlement around the Longshan period (ca. 2600-2000 BC) center of Yaowangcheng, which is just to the north of where we are walking now. We also hope to learn how the past settlement patterns in this area are different or similar to the population pattern around the other large Longshan period center in our survey region, Liangchengzhen.

This year at the outset our survey team is composed of the three of us from The Field Museum (Anne, Linda, and me) along with three Chinese participants from Shandong University. The latter are Dr. Hui Fang, who has been working on the survey from the start of the project along with two graduate students. Ms. Jin worked with us briefly in year 9, while Mr. Hui is with us for the first time. Mr. Hui grew up in a small village in the Rizhao District, so although he is a newcomer to our team, he has extensive experience in this general area. Once again, we are being helped by the same cab driver who has worked with us during the past few seasons (Mr. Liu). To date, no one has been lost or injured, we are covering a good deal of ground and finding lots of sites, so things are off to an auspicious start!

Captions: 1. Collecting ceramics at an archaeological site discovered in 2005. 2. Surveying the landscape. 3. Eating lunch outside on a warm day.