Photos

Picture of said cliff I was talking about





Part where i fell





Looking down and out from a top





Houses with shell that we look for





Shell profile cut




Floating temple






Other scenic pictures







Hill top tombs





What the zooarchaeologist in me photographs for future reference





I told jeff to tell oscar that this is what would happen to him if he continued to pull any shenanigans similar to his knocking over a george foreman and steak stealing extravaganza

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Well I have been pretty MIA lately…but I haven’t gotten any frantic e-mail’s either so I assume no one is over worrying too much about my meanderings in China.

The past week as been pretty standard in terms of work, though in this past week we did discover a new tomb, and a few new sites. This past weekend we picked up Henry- a professor from Michigan and a legend in the field. Now that he is a part of the team, there is a different standard and expectation. We have been working later days, until the sun goes down. It’s hard because it pushes everything into later hours…sometimes I really feel what is expected is very unrealistic and down right unhealthy. Yesterday we had to cover this very large, terraced hill. This would have been okay, if Alice had put all 9 of us on there…but instead she split everyone into 3 groups. One group wasn’t on the hill at all, they were out doing test cores in the fields where we discovered a site. The other two were split and made to cover the two separate mounds of the hill (said mounds were massive by the way). By putting so few people within one area, you lose sight of everyone pretty quickly, which is very unnerving if you fall or get hurt. Despite this, I take my mark and set to follow my transect around the entirety of the hill. At first it is easy. The terraces were well defined and had wide edges. I dug at the cuts with my pick looking for any traces of pottery or shell or bone. As I followed east, the hill became steeper and my terrace ledge more narrow. Eventually I was met with a huge face cut (read: cliff). Alice radiod me to let me know that I would need to clim to the top to get around the face of the cliff and then head back down to my terrace and reclaim my transect. Climbing up was a challenge, but again, this side of the cliff wasn’t too bad. Once I found myself on the other side, things changed. Trying to climb back down was…an…adventure (read:near death experience). The other side of the cliff face was so steep, it might as well have been the cliff face itself…oh mr. hill my my my aren’t we deceptive, pile on some grass and you appear climbeable..but alas you are not. By creeping steadily down the hill, I had a few close calls which merely resulted in me sliding down a few feet…perhaps my innerself was posing it’s objections to where I am this time of year…I should be sledding down snow covered hills, not trapesing down rocky ones. There was one tumble I took which really pushed me to my limits. I tumlbled down, and everything spilled from my backpack…my camera, my compass, my walkie talking, my phone, my water bottle, my glasses…I managed to roll through something with prickers…I laid still…knowing I was okay, just startled…but the sigh of relief for not being hurt quickly turned into rage…I believe my line of thought was “fuck this fuck this fuck this.”

Seriously

Fuck this

I could have broken my kneck and no one would have known. To have asked me to find a way back down that hill and to my transect was not only irresponsible, it was fucking insane. I grabbed my pick and just started hacking away at this stupid hill. I would walk about 10 steps and do it again. Eventually I found myself in someone’s terraced garden. Bamboo and Melon trees, with their green branches shielded the sun away and I finally felt calm again. I sat down and just meditated for a minute. When I looked North, I realized if nothing else, I knew exactly where I was…I could walk off that hill any time I wanted, and be able to tell someone exactly where to come get me. Not only this, I realized that I had made it back to my transect. So I kept going until Alice (field director) finally radio’d me to just head down the hill and back to the village…apparently she had realized how difficult this trek was and how ridiculous it was to have so few people on it.

Today was a lot of flat area, rice paddies, green houses, etc so that was a little less demanding…though at the end of the day I was covering a field with Henry and there was a horse in the middle of the path/transect I was supposed to follow. In general, I don’t like getting close enough to anything non human whose bite could potentially take of a limb. But henry said, oh that horse is nice just walk around him..or her..yeah that’s a her. I saw that the horse was tied up, but there was enough rope to give her a good radius of running space. She did look harmless so I kept walking sure enough…as soon as I was within 2 feet of Mrs Ed she keeled back and started charging for me…I’m sure the look on my face was priceless…I’m pretty sure I dropped a “jesus fucking christ” in front of Henry, though I’ve heard him say much worse. I sprinted away trampling some farmers cabbages wih the horse not far behind…I got far enough away to where her rope coud not reach. That was a close one.

Today I am up for another day of work…we didn’t really do anything for thanksgiving here…they had wine at dinner, but of course I don’t like wine so even that token of celebration didn’t even appeal to me. It was okay though…luckily enough the 60 degree whether leaves me feeling like it isn’t really november and that I’m not actually missing the hoidays. I’m sure I will be overwhelmed in December when christmas cheer hits me out of no where. Perhaps I will start listening to some christmas music.

Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy thanksgiving. I hope everyone is having a great meal!

Okay this was the entry i wrote the other day...i still can't get pictures up...but once I can..i will

Things are getting better now that I have adjusted to more of a routine here. It’s still pretty draining because the director just has us working straight through without any time off. We haven’t really been hiking the mountains as much though…the land we have been covering is flat so the work itself is not nearly as intensive as it had been those first few days. Today we convered 7 square kilometers. That is a lot…ideally you would want to have everyone walking in straight transects through said square kilometer units, but of course this never happens. You find yourself doing all sorts of zig zagging. Today was a perfect example. In the afternoon, the mission seemed simple enough…stay in your transect, walk East until we hit the free way, which is only 3 and a half kilometers away. First of all, the topography was mainly flat, but had green houses all throughout. Everything would have been fine if the green houses were all oriented east west, but of course they are not. Some are north to south, some are diagnally arranged northwest etc. So you find yourself having to compensate for all the green houses you perimeter and go through. Today’s green houses were particularly challenging because a lot of them were fenced in…so I would be following my compass, doin fine, heading east and then realize that I was completely fenced into an area and had to go out of my way in order to get out. Other obstacles, as I have mentioned in the past are dogs. I would say that on about 5 different occasions today, I had to turn around and find an alternative route because I was chased away by a big scary dog. There is also the issue of canals…once you get to a canal you have to move to where there is a place to cross which also takes you out of your transect. With everyone trying to find their transects in such a mess and over such a huge area, getting lost is inevitable, especially if you are me and you are the only one without a handheld GPS. I think the team spends more time looking for me than looking for sites. That’s an exaggeration, I have gotten a lot better…but one of the first things I did learn to say in chines is “I’m lost” “wo mi lu.”

In the past week we have been more successful in locating the extent of bronze age sites throughout the area. The key thing we look for are bronze age pottery sherds, and a specific kind of shell that would have comprised a shell mound site. We found 2 shell mound sites, but the pottery is still pretty scarce.

A lot of the shells can be found in the village houses…the mudbrick of these houses naturally is taken from the fields and you can see all of the shell in the walls of the houses. You also get pottery in the walls too. We have spent the past few days talking to residents about where they have seen shell and pottery.





Last night we had a Hot Pot dinner. In hot pot dinner, there is basically a stove in the center of the table, and there is a huge boiling pot with broth, vegetables and seasonings. Then you order the things you want boiled in the hot pot. We had two, one meat one, and a vegetarian one for me…though I do say vegetarian loosely…I’m pretty sure it was chicken stock, but they had gone out of their way to set it up that I really didn’t have the heart to say anything about it…but my stomach paid for it later. I had discovered that there are two things that I do really really like here in terms of food. One of them is this twisted kind of tofu. The texture is really good. The other is lotus root. I loveee lotus root. I think its hard to come by in the states, but I was told that some specialty asian markets might have it.

i have a post written but its not letting me upload pictures.....ggrrr....stay tuned!

I'll say this much though:

Aunt Michele, I got your message saying you could read between the lines and see I wasn’t coming home for christmas….I don’t know what lines you are reading but I’ll be fucking damned if I’m not coming home for christmas! 27 more days…

I know it must be both disappointing and disconcerting when you go to check my blog and the daily entries for which you are all used to, are missing…or perhaps I severely overestimate the amount of readers I have. The work days here are different than what I had in Egypt…no one really adheres to a schedule and you don’t really get as much individual time…I can’t really just do whatever I want like I could when I was living in Egypt…here I am expected to attend banquets, and meet village chiefs, provincial mayors, and all other collaborators who had a hand in seeing this project through, even though it is not my project and throughout these various gatherings I never have any sense of what is being talked about.

So far a standard day is like this.

We wake up at 7:00 a.m. I share a room with my field director Alice. I had her as a grad student instructor at Michigan and I have known her for a few years now. We get up and make some coffee, which I have now learned to drink without any sugar since it really is not readily used or available around here. We head downstairs for breakfast which is usually a bowl of noodles in a chile oil broth. Everyone elses also has pork and it’s usually a pretty big ordeal to get my noodles plain…you would think in an area that housed the history of Buddhism, the concept of vegetarianism would be somewhat widespread, but it is pretty perplexing and absurd to them. Eventually my noodles get to me and by then everyone else is done with theirs…this is all fine because I’m not a big fan of inhaling something with that much chile sauce first thing in the morning (though across the board everyone has been impressed with how much I can tolerate spicy food here). After we finish breakfast we determine which square kilometers within the survey area we will aim to cover. We load up into the minivan and head out, usually driving about 30 to 40 minutes until we are dropped off in the middle of no where…no matter what the landscape is, we divide the area up and start surveying the ground for any remnants of ancient bronze age sites (looking for pottery sherds and cowrie shell mounds, or a particular kind of brick). A lot of the time we are hiking up huge hills or mountains, or traversing farmland…














It entails a lot of walking and climbing and jumping over canals..or failing to jump over canals if you are me….between noon and one we eventually go and eat lunch somewhere…meals here are communal…a bunch of food is placed on a platform in the center of a table. The platform spins and everyone eats from the dishes on the platform. Coming here I forgot all about the whole chopsticks thing. My experience with chopsticks has been limited to picking up sushi rolls…now I have to pick up anything from non firm tofu, to invidual corn kernals, to rice. I have improved a lot…sometimes if too many people are watching I falter and drop something in the middle of the table…one of the first days here, someone snydely said, “I’m surprised she knows what chopsticks are.” In the villages a lot of the people have never even seen foreigners before…the other day our survey area ended just outside of a school that was letting out. When the children walked out, their red communist scarves adorning their necks, they all grabbed some treats from the street vendors and then surrounded me and stared. They say, “foreigner foreigner, look at the foreigner.”

I usually just smile…my field appearance makes it look like they are living the extravagant life though, let me tell you. I sport my typical field pants which by days end are covered in the red iron rich soil. I wear one of those big floppy straw hats to protect me from the sun (the UV rays are very strong here). They also prevent spiders from getting in my hair when I walk into the webs.

Things have been pretty uneventful so far since we are surveying so far from the Lake Basin.






The Lake Basin is where the Necropolis of the Dian Kingdom was located. The intent is to do a full systematic survey of the extent of the kingdom as a whole, and not just cherry pick where we know sites will be. However, once we find sites, extensive documentation and profiling will need to be done and our director is realizing that we will be pressed for time if we keep surveying these outskirts so distant from the Basin. So we will be switching gears and I will hopefully start feeling like and archaeologist and not some nomadic rice farmer.

Last night we were invited to eat in a village by one of the chinese team member’s brother. We drove into the heart of one of these villages an ate in a typical village courtyard. It was humbling and overwhelming all at the same time. Sanitarily speaking, I doubt anyone I know would ever dream of eating here, but the villagers were just so generous, and the food was actually very good…better than any of the restaurants I’ve been to here. They were nice enough to set up the center platform so that all the vegetarian stuff was in front of me. We toasted a lot…a standard at the Chinese dinner.

Tonight we were expected to go into another village and banquet again (they apparently killed a goat for us). Our director got us out it…the thing is, we don’t usually get home from the field until after 6 and the meals take a very long time…we get back to our rooms and everyone is trying to wrap up notes and send their emails or make their calls before passing out in exhaustion…ok that last one is mainly applicable to me…I got a huge cheer when I stayed up past 10 the past two nights….I usually am out before 9. Which is why you don’t hear from me all too often….China is 13 hours ahead in case you didn’t already know…

I’m doing my best to tough the survey work. It’s pretty involved and those first few days I was still fighting jet lag and…stomach…issues…They also have me assessing the fauna for two other sites from this region. Yesterday I spent the day washing bone and doing my best to identify it without a comparative collection. I had no idea I would be working on fauna while I was here. I know that I will be doing it in India, but truth be told, I haven’t looked at animal bone since my first season in Egypt…I was very nervous…I thought I would forget what everything was (it’s been nearly 2 years!). I go through boughts where I doubt my capabilities and really just feel like a fraud in terms of what I can actually accomplish. There has basically been no research completed on the fauna from this area, and the professor who was supposed to look at this material is actually one of the professors I talked to when I went to Harvard. He has looked at it before since it contains evidence for early domestication of Water Buffalo…I’m not doing a very thorough analysis since the sample size is very small and I have no skeletal material to work with…there are 4 species of deer which I have no way of differentiating…especially seeing as though I didn’t even have to ID deer when I worked in Egypt. Also there is a lot of fish (which makes sense given the fact that these sites are associated with the lake shore) but there is are only 3 known fresh water fish species…there is no other fresh water fish because of the pollution…there is nothing living in the lake period to my knowledge. It is definitely a challenge, but they want me to try and ID all of it and then see if I can establish any sort of stratigraphic detailing of the sites….I need to do some research on the reproductive cycles of the deer and perhaps I can get somewhere with it, but I remain hesitant to really put my name on anything like this when patterns are hard to establish when my sample size is…a box per site. But it is a good way, as I have mentioned, of getting my foot in the door on conducting research on fauna analysis in the area.

Okay that should cover the past few days, and some of the upcoming days. I am safe and my face is no longer reacting from the poison and peticides.

And um…I can’t wait to come home…we are working straight through the next two weekends which is definitely tough…but the permit is up the 11th so less than 4 weeks to finish. I don’t get home until the 18th and I’m trying to see if I can get home earlier…everyone thinks I’m pretty much ridiculous for doing these two seasons back to back (China then India). By the time I recover from jet lag in the states, I will be shipped off to yet another 8 hour time difference. But you all know me…take on the challenges, and then complain about them here ☺

So i finally got internet to work at here...the wireless at the hotel was a pain to set up because apparently no one in china uses macs....

Things have been

very


very


very


difficult

I absolutely hate the food here....its loaded with salt and oil that just rocks my stomach...I just can't handle it.

My allergies are terrible...I'm sneezing and weezing and post nasal dripping all over the place

And I hate surveying...They place you in the middle of a mountain and tell you to start walking in a certain direction while looking at the ground for bronze age pottery sherds, or any other indicators of a site being below the surface...I have no sense of direction, so more often than not I wind up lost in the middle of a mountain range, or a rice pattie field, or a terrace of tall grass...as I hike through trying to find my way, trying to find any one within the 1 square km they are supposed to be in...I find myself tangled in spider webs and face to face with swollen bodied spiders you hope only to see in national geographic...there are also big dogs roaming many of these fields...how do we deal with them...a bamboo stick and a fucking prayer

none of this really tops my day yesterday when I fell into a canal and smashed my face on some poisonous plant....this of course happened while I was lost and others were looking for me...when i finally found my director, I tried to act like nothing really happened while I was missing (despite the fact that my face was burning and I was completely soaked). I fought back tears when she and our chinese collaborator looked up at me and said, "oh my god what happened to your face?"

It was then that they rushed me back to the hotel....My face was pretty red and puffy and swollen...its gone down, and now just has some scratches...Today was better once they taught me how to use the GPS unit and how to use the satellite maps...now I always know where I am, even if where I am is really unpleasant. The higher altitude for where we are walking and searching for these sites is problematic too...I have a harder time keeping hydrated here than i do in Egypt despite the fact that temps max out at 70 degrees.

I'm trying trying trying to have a better attitude, I just had no idea what survey worked entailed. We cover 8-10 miles a day and while we were supposed to have the weekends off...it is looking like that is not going to happen these first two weeks. Ugh

Fortunately enough for me, it turns out that they have fauna from some surrounding shell mound sites separate from this project that they want me to identify...this means that tomorrow, I will have a lab day instead of surveying. This is also great because it gets my foot in the door for compiling research that hasn't been done yet here.

Lots of downs...but some ups

I don't know about China...when i worked my first season in Egypt and was asked about coming back the next year, I agreed without hesitation....this place... don't know that I would exert the same enthusiasm. It might be that I hate the surveying work though...maybe things would be different if we were in the same spot every day, excavating as opposed to walking the fields and hills of rural China. Also here, no one speaks English except my director, but when the whole team is together she speaks chinese with all of them..so I'm just the odd one out...it's a different experience.

Per usual with my field work, I am super exhausted every day...AND NO ONE DRINKS COFFEE HERE....we packed some of our own (us Americans) and all they ever tell us is how bad it is for us (this while they eat the fattiest fried grossness you can imagine). Our dinner table the other night had fried duck intestines....dont even get me started on the types of entrees I have staring me in the face...literally staring me in the face...chicken and fowl heads.. things of this nature...I get chills whenever I see the meat products...its enough to reaffirm my stance as a vegetarian and even leave me wanting to eliminate more animal products from my diet...I'm sure a lot of the foods they tell me are vegetarian are not...i'm sure they are made with some kind of animal stock, or lard, or grease that animal was fried in which is probably another reason my stomach is never happy.

Okay that is my rant for now...all things considered I am okay...just not the happiest camper...but, I'm sure I will find my niche and things will get better. I have learned a lot, and I'm sure the work will get more exciting as soon as we find more sites...so far we haven't found much in our survey.

Have a good day/night everyone. I will try to stay in touch.

It is going on 9 p.m. Friday evening here in Kumning. Which means that many of you are just beginning your day and counting down the hours until the weekend. I’m still adjusting to the time change (13 hours forward if you didn’t do the math already). When jet lagged in Egypt a lot of the time I found myself waking up in the middle of the night. Some days I wake up at 6 am and can’t fall asleep, but for the most part I seem to have the whole going to bed when its dark, and waking up when it’s light thing down. However throughout the day I really drag…once 1 p.m. hits I’m fighting my bodys urge to fall asleep and return to the cycle I’ve known the past 6 months. I perk right back up around 8 at night when it seems like it should really be time for morning….but I go through these bouts where I feel that nauseousness you get from pulling an all nighter. I think tomorrow it should be well underway though.

The 20 plus hours of traveling and walking around various airports was surreal but in retrospect passed by relatively quickly. This includes the 2 extra hours I had to spend filing paperwork for the luggage that never arrived. It was a painstaking process as I was absolutely exhausted and beyond frustrated trying to talk to a woman who did not know any english and fill out a form that was covered in chinese characters. Meanwhile they would not let my field director, Alice, come and help translate…which of course is understandable because of air port security…but at the same time it really took a lot for me to try and shrug it off as something small I could do nothing about…there was a brief moment when I thought I was just going to start sobbing like an over exhausted child. I am proud to say that despite everything I did not shed a single tear. I was happy that I had packed extra clothes in my carry on in case something like this did happen. Since my plane didn’t arrive until after midnight, after everything was done, I didn’t get back to the flat in Kunming until after 3 a.m.

Right now I am in downtown Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. There are not very many tourists here so I definitely stand out. It is a pretty lively place with a population of about 4 million, but lacks the chaos and crowding of places like Beijing and my former home away from home, Cairo. The character of Kunming changes depending on the time of day. When I got in at 3 am, everything was dark and empty. The cab dropped us off in an alley. As the rain poured down, I stared at the ground dreading the idea of spending the next 6 weeks in a place that was shady in its demeanor and that left me feeling uneasy and unsettled. However, the next day, the sun exposed the upbeat and friendly atmosphere that hung from the awnings of Kunming’s quaint boutiques and restaurants. In the day, Kunming is a bustling place with street vendors selling hot pots, produce, and roasted peanuts. People weave in and out of each other’s way, on foot, on car, on scooter…it is a very strange hub of small shops, with everything you could ever need pretty close at hand….hiking/outdoor stores, salons, bars, theaters, restaurants, café’s…but all still without any sort of western or consumerist feel to it because every place is very mom and pop. Kunming is also interesting in terms of its racial diversity. Very few people here are actually Chinese, they are usually a mix of some sort. They speak of their minority clans and their minority lineages. Nonetheless I still stand out…Alice said that the fact that I wear matching clothes will make me stand out more than anything. Everyone else maintains a pretty loud and wild style…a lot of bright colors and mismatching of pattern. Kunming nightlife is probably my favorite…the whole city is painted with bright flourescent lights and glows unlike anything I’ve ever seen. If you saw this in America, it would look tacky and tasteless, but here it just seems so appropriate. It conveys a sense of free spiritedness that I find pretty unique, but I also haven’t seen places like Vegas lit up back in the states.

It didn’t take long for my luggage to arrive. It turns out that I was supposed to get my luggage in Beijing and go through customs there, recheck it and have it sent to Kunming. However this was not what I was told when I was in Detroit…there I was told that I would not see my luggage again or have to do anything until I reached my final destination at Kunming Air Port. Lesson learned. This will hold true on the way back too….I will go through customs in Newark and not in Detroit- which is a nice thing because that means I can just walk straight out of the airport when I land in Detroit.

My misfortunes did not end with the missing luggage. The next day I went to purchase an international phone (probably about time I got one) and some cards with minutes on it to use for the rest of my time here. My jet lag left me pretty unattentive and unaware of my surroundings and it didn’t take long for my stuff to get stolen. It was a sad realization of a good amount of money lost- but again I kept my spirits up knowing it was just a phone and it could have been worse…it could have my been my purse with my passport or something like that. I was still super bummed though because I was planning on calling jeff when I got home.

To remedey the phone situation for now though, I downloaded Skype and paid for unlimited use of it which only costs 13 dollars a month. I can call any landline or mobile in the US. So that is nice.

Today, we hike through the Western Hills.



It is a mountain range in Southern Kunming which holds various ancient buddhist temples. We hiked through the mountains, combining some site seeing with work as we looked down on where the site we will be surveying is. At one of the temples tehre was a statue of a Turtle. Alice turned to Matt and I and said that it is supposed to be good luck to touch the head of the turtle. The three of us looked down at it- each person kind of holding back but projecting the urge to touch the head despite the superstition behind it….I then blurted out…”I’m touchin it!....With everything happening to me so far I need some good luck.”

Our hike covered a good 10 km which is good practice since survey work will have us covering 12 km a day.





Those are kind of the happenings as they stand now. Monday we have to meet with customs and let them look through our computers. Then we have a subsequent banquent and meeting with the Chinese officials to go over some of the rules and things to be aware of while working here. Tuesday we pack up and leave the flat and head to the rural outskirts of Kunming. Our hotel is supposed to have wireless like I mentioned, and I am really hoping that it does so that I can remain in contact. If not it is going to be really difficult especially since we will be working straight through the first two weekends.

It is really different being a part of a project that is just beginning. It really allows for you to learn in a different way- exposes you to how things happen and what can go wrong before the shovels come out. I’m excited to learn more.