About.com: Why did you choose to investigate Shandong province?
Gary Feinman: The decision to survey in coastal Shandong Province was made collectively by the members of our international team. The site of Liangchengzhen was well known to scholars as a large Neolithic center. But little was known about how this site related to other known Longshan (Late Neolithic) sites in the vicinity. Was Liangchengzhen the same size as other villages/sites of that time or much larger? This is a key question, as it can inform us about the sociopolitical organization at that time.
Before we began, our team reviewed what was known about the archaeology in the region and we visited the four best-known sites. Two of those sites, Liangchengzhen and Yaowangcheng, seemed bigger than the others, but what we didn't know was their relationship to each other (as they were separated by tens of kilometers).
We elected to begin the survey at Liangchengzhen and proceed out from there. We initially thought that we would do this for only a few years. But as the project continued, we eventually surveyed all four sites that we visited in year one (and everything in-between) and discovered how they all fit into regional settlement history.
About.com: What kinds of things were you interested in discovering when you started out on your survey in Shandong, and how has that changed?
Gary Feinman: Our initial goals were (1) to find out if regional survey could even be implemented in China, (2) to discover how Liangchenzhen was related to other Longshan sites in the area, and (3) to understand what preceded the Longshan occupation of this region and what happened in post-Longshan times. Over time, some members of our team became more interested in later eras, specifically the long-term connections between this coastal basin and the heartland of later Chinese civilizations to the west. The paper on the list of readings written by Feinman, Nicholas, and Fang (2010) largely focuses on the times of the Qin and Han empires (thousands of years after the Longshan era).
