6-Day Xi'an Archaeology Study Tour: Field Methods & Finds

Morning — Arrival and Check-in
Fly into Xi'an and transfer by private vehicle to the study base for check-in.

Afternoon — Opening Ceremony and Lecture
Attend the opening ceremony, where instructors set out the structure and learning objectives of the programme, then listen to 'Chang'an: History of a 13-Dynasty Capital' to establish the historical groundwork for the days ahead.

Evening — The Study Journal Workshop
A workshop on keeping a study journal: standard field-research documentation, how to record what you see, and how to turn notes into evidence.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Study base: standard twin room with private bathroom, air conditioning and hot water

Morning — why stratigraphy is the whole argument
The course opens where every field school opens, with superposition: in an undisturbed deposit, each layer is younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above. In the Guanzhong basin that principle sits on an unusually deep archive, because the loess began blowing in during the Pleistocene and has been accumulating for more than two million years, with darker palaeosol bands marking the wetter intervals between the dust. That sequence gives Chinese archaeology both its dating framework and its problem: loess is soft, it stands in vertical faces for years, and it swallows a site without trace when it collapses. The morning covers natural versus cultural deposits, what a living floor looks like as against a fill, and why an excavator destroys the thing they are trying to understand - which is the reason the record is the product.

Late morning — the recording chain
The session then moves to the paperwork that carries the whole discipline. A context sheet describes one deposit or cut: its position, its shape, its boundary with the layers above and below, its soil colour read against a standard chart, its inclusions, its thickness, and the finds it produced. Boundaries are drawn in section at 1:10 and in plan at 1:20, always with a north arrow, a scale and the date. Photographs need a scale bar and a slate with the site code, the context number and the direction. Cutting-edge practice has added photogrammetry and dense three-dimensional recording, which lets a trench be re-measured after it has gone. The morning closes with the diagram that ties the sheets together: the matrix, in which each box is one event and each line is a relationship, developed as a formal method in the 1970s and now standard worldwide.

Lunch
At the venue - biang biang noodles, cumin lamb or a bowl of beef soup, which is what Xi'an eats at midday.

Afternoon — practical: record a section
Participants work in pairs on a prepared section - a tray of stacked sand, gravel, brick rubble and soil built for teaching, not a real deposit - and produce a context sheet, a 1:10 section drawing and a photographic record for each layer they can distinguish. A total station is demonstrated so that the link between the drawing and real three-dimensional coordinates is visible rather than theoretical. Dating methods are discussed at the level of what each one can and cannot answer: radiocarbon for organic material, luminescence for sediments that have been buried and bleached, and typology for ceramics where no absolute date is available. Nothing here is real excavation; the point is that the records are, and they are assessed on accuracy rather than on neatness.

Cultural Insight — rescue archaeology
Most excavation in China is not research-driven. It is salvage work carried out ahead of construction - roads, metro lines, housing, industrial parks - under a system that requires a survey before land is developed, which is why the scale of excavation is so large and the pressure to publish is so heavy. Sites are frequently dug, recorded and built over within a few seasons. That reality explains the emphasis in this course on recording: the archive, not the trench, is what survives. It also explains why the discipline has moved so far towards non-destructive survey - geophysics, aerial and drone photography, surface collection under licence - for the first pass at any new area.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Xi'an.

Morning — rules first
The visit is arranged through a local heritage or research institution, and the exact site, the access conditions and the agenda are confirmed before you travel, because a working excavation can be closed, backfilled or busy at short notice. On arrival the site director sets out the constraints, and they matter more than any photograph you will take: stay on the marked walkways, never step onto or over a baulk, touch nothing including the spoil, keep away from the edges of any open face, wear the footwear you were asked to bring, carry no bags or tripods in the working area, and ask before using a camera anywhere. Metal detecting, surface collecting and the removal of any object - a sherd, a roof tile, a nail - are prohibited by law and end the visit.

Late morning — reading the site plan
A site is a grid before it is a hole. You will usually see a trench or block laid out with strings and pegs fixed to a coordinate system, with a step or baulk left standing between squares so that the stratigraphy can be read in section after the deposit has been removed. The spoil heap is not waste: it is graded by deposit, and it is sieved, dry or wet, for small finds and bone. A flotation tank may be running to recover charred plant remains from bulk samples. If a section face is being drawn, you will see how the excavators work from the top down in plan and clean the face before measuring it - the slowest and least cinematic part of archaeology, and the part that produces everything else.

Lunch
A lunch box at the site or a restaurant nearby, depending on the day's programme; participants eat away from the working area, which is also the rule for staff.

Afternoon — the finds processing station
Everything dug up arrives somewhere, and that somewhere is a table with water, trays and drying racks. The processing station shows the sequence: a bulk find is bagged in the trench with the context number written on the bag, then washed - unless a residue sample has been taken, in which case it is deliberately left dirty - then dried in the shade so that bone does not crack, then marked with the site code and context number in ink and given a coat of clear lacquer, then sorted into ceramic, bone, stone, metal, glass and shell, counted, weighed and bagged for storage. The staff will talk about sampling strategy and what each sample can be asked: plant remains from flotation, animal bone for species and butchery, charcoal for radiocarbon, sediment for luminescence. What they will not do is hand you a real find, and you should not ask.

Cultural Insight — excavation destroys its own evidence
The uncomfortable core of the discipline is that a deposit can only be excavated once. Every interpretation depends on records made by people standing in a hole in the rain, which is why recording standards, photography and the archive carry the weight they do, and why a site that is dug and never published is regarded in the field as a loss regardless of what was found. Participants should expect the site staff to be more interested in the context sheet than in the object, and to say so. The corollary is unwelcome and worth stating: a site that is excavated and then lost to a construction schedule, without the records being written up and deposited, has produced a temporary display of objects and no knowledge at all.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Xi'an.

Morning — The Mausoleum with a Researcher
Visit the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, where a museum researcher walks you through Pits 1, 2 and 3 and the Bronze Chariots. The focus is archaeological: the design logic of the mausoleum, the arrangement of the military array, and what the excavation record can and cannot tell us.

Afternoon — Cultural Relic Restoration Workshop
Enter the restoration workshop and work alongside professional conservators: reassemble pottery fragments, clean corrosion from bronze. You learn quickly how much patience heritage preservation takes.

Evening — Seminar: The Significance of Qin's Unification
Group discussion on the historical significance of Qin's unification of China, analysing the rise of the Qin empire and what it left behind, guided by your instructors.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Study base: standard twin room with private bathroom, air conditioning and hot water

Morning — the Shaanxi History Museum
The programme opens where the objects are. The Shaanxi History Museum holds more than 370,000 pieces, and the collection runs from the Zhou bronzes through the Han and the Northern Wei to the Tang gold and silver. Your guide works through the rooms in sequence rather than room by room, so that the workshop in the afternoon has something concrete to point back to: the ornament on the bronzes, the patterns cut into the lacquerware, and the way characters were written before they were printed.

Afternoon — Paper-cutting and Calligraphy Workshop
The afternoon is hands-on, and it is the centre of the three days. With a local craftsperson you learn paper-cutting in the Shaanxi manner, working from traditional motifs and cutting the design freehand, then move to the brush: how to hold it, the order of the strokes, and why the order matters. Both pieces are yours to keep, and by the end of the session you will have cut one design and written your own name in characters.

Meals
Breakfast and lunch included.

Morning — Free
The pace of the programme is deliberately broken on the last morning. Families who want one more circuit of the wall can walk or cycle a section of it from the nearest gate; those who would rather shop will find the mosque quarter a short walk from most central hotels and still busy in the morning. Nothing is scheduled, so the group can sleep in after the evening food streets.

Lunch — Farewell Lunch
A farewell lunch in the city centre, with time afterwards to finish packing and settle the room.

Afternoon — Departure
Your guide transfers the group to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport (XIY) for the flight home, or to Xi'an North Railway Station for the high-speed service to Beijing, Zhengzhou or Chengdu, assisting with luggage and check-in. Families extending the trip can continue to Chengdu or Shanghai on the same rail network, and your guide will confirm the platform and seat allocations before departure.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.