My usual routine when in Rizhao is to get up at 5:00 or 5:30 AM so that I attend to email before the prior workday is concluded in the Chicago area. So when I hear the rat-ta-tat-tat of firecrackers outside our hotel on the street, it is always more of a cause for a chuckle than a disturbance. Morning firecrackers are an auditory signal that a wedding will be happening in the neighborhood later that day, and so that it is a lucky day in the traditional local lunar calendar. The more firecrackers, the more weddings, and likely the luckier the date. Even numbered dates in the traditional calendar seem to be the preferred days for Rizhao-area nuptials.

This past week, on the 15th of November in our calendar, we set a project record for seeing/passing different marriage ceremonies. Most of our 'evidence' for weddings came while we were on the road driving to the region where we planned to survey for the day (of course, our current work area is distant from Rizhao right now). As a consequence, we are in the car for awhile and so the record is not surprising. Weddings are easily discernable because in addition to crackling the dawn with fireworks, the traditional custom here includes a procession, in which the bride and groom and their entourage ride around their community in cars (often rented) just for the special occasion. Generally the lead car is an open pick-up that includes several frolicking revelers in the back. These include a drummer playing a large round drum and sometimes a person with cymbals as well as a firecracker thrower. This first vehicle carries a tinseled banner proclaiming 'double happiness' and often some small flags. The cars following the pick-up are usually black sedans and have their headlights on. Often they have artificial flowers and balloons tied on their roof. One of these cars includes the marrying couple, the bride in her traditional red dress and the groom in a western style suit.

Spotting these processions is one of our main amusements as we wend our way to the destination where we start surveying each day. To ensure that we walkover the entire landscape bit by bit and day by day requires a good deal of planning. Deciding where we should most efficiently begin and end, near passable roads so that we can have our driver pick us up.

When we are in the field here, the juxtaposition of past and present comes out so dramatically. Not only in our present mission to find, map, and collect ceramics and stone tools from the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, but also in the extremely rapid changes that are taking place in this country right in front of our eyes. It is not unusual to see a woman washing laundry in a cold stream, beating her clothes with a wooden stick in the customary way to get them clean. Turn your head, and someone is chatting on a cell phone. Water buffalo pull ploughs in the field, while semis full of steel I-bars course the adjacent road. Or most strikingly, slowly inching by a large steel factory and nuclear power plant on a narrow dirt road at several miles an hour because a weathered elderly man in a blue Mao-style jacket is driving his horse drawn cart full of corn stalks in front of you. Those are the images of rural China today, where a rapidly developing present is meeting a traditional life way that had changed relatively little from decades or even centuries ago.

By the way, we have been finding lots of large and interesting sites of late. One of the more interesting dated to the Zhou and Han periods and literally was situated in sand dunes. We found the most pottery along the banks of a recent and deep water channel that bisected this ancient occupation. In the next dispatch, I will speak more of some of some the other interesting sites we have found recently.

The word of the day is "hun li," which means 'wedding.' "Hun" means 'marriage' and "li" signifies 'ceremonial ritual.'