About.com: How did you get involved in China?
Gary Feinman: Again, I was fortunate during the early 1990s to fall into a good research opportunity. I had been teaching at the University of Wisconsin for some time, and our Oaxaca research was transitioning toward domestic excavations in order to address key economic questions. I taught a comparative class on the rise of early civilizations every year, and felt frustrated by what I could read and say in class about early China. Here was one of the great civilizations of the past, and yet because of my language limitations and the absence of truly regional archaeological perspectives, English-speaking scholars understood less about the rise of cities and states in China as compared to Mexico, Peru, Mesopotamia, or the Mediterranean.
In the 1990s, China was opening up to foreign archaeologists. At that time, I was asked by Anne Underhill, now at Yale University, if I would be interested in joining a Sino-American research project that was to focus on the rise of complex societies in coastal Shandong Province. Both Anne and her four Chinese colleagues from Shandong University were interested in starting the joint field research with a survey around the Neolithic site of Liangchengzhen. But, since systematic regional survey was new to China, there was a need to bring in specialists from other areas to train students and faculty in survey procedures. In fact, because of the long history of river flooding and erosion and the time depth of the region's sites, many scholars doubted whether surface survey techniques could even locate past settlements in China.
Never having been to China, but firmly believing in the importance of regional surveys as a key component through which archaeologists could explore and understand the cycles of early civilizations, I jumped at the invitation. My only request was that Linda should be invited too, since she had the expertise with maps. This request saved the project in year one, when we used outdated maps that were missing sections of the landscape, and Linda had to literally map the countryside at the same time she was recording sites.
To make a long story short, our Sino-American team got along well, recorded many sites, and we continued surveying together for 13 seasons. Now, looking back, I do think that collaborations like ours (there have been a handful of regional archaeological projects implemented by international teams in China over the past two decades) have helped foster a much greater understanding of early Chinese civilizations, particularly in the West. At the same time, I also think that support for regional archaeological approaches has grown among Chinese scholars, both as an important vantage on the past and as a means of recording valuable cultural resources before they disappear with rapid contemporary urbanization and development.
