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 ☺