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| Wild Goose Pagoda Xi'an |
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| A long standing army |
I’m not thinking about the nuts-n-bolts of Petra Archaeological Park today. It wasn’t too long ago that one-winter evening Meme asked me where I’d like to travel to later that year and I replied: “China.” As an undergrad student I’d studied Asian History, and as grad was pursuing Chinese archeology when I started my NPS career. I still remember Dr. Darlena Blucher’s words of advice to me at the Society for American Archaeology Conference in Dallas (1975): “Stay out of the Southwest, there are too damn many archeologists there already.” She was a Meso-Americanist (Teotihuacan), and I was “thinking dirt” at Bandelier, but still very much interested in China. After all, it was just the year before that 3 farmers were putting in a well outside Xi’an and had rediscovered the burial army of China’s unifier and 1st Emperor Qin (Chin) Shi Huang ti. It is now a World Heritage Site, like Petra, and I didn’t balk at the thought of finally seeing it. Xi'an is the beginning of The Silk Road: commerce & trade that brought our most important commodity (ideas) in both directions.
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| City Wall - Xi'an |
It wasn’t going to be like a previous trip where I just stumbled upon Kakadu National Park (Northern Territory, Australia) and ended up talking to the Superintendent about a Chief Ranger job (I can still see Meme & Justin’s face when I told them that Kakadu is home to over 1,000 species of flies). This time Meme & I were going on-tour that would include planned stops at World Heritage locales. Many of the primary features at PAP date to the same time-frame as Qin. The “palace intrigue” that surrounded and followed him were also similar to those employed throughout the Roman Empire for millennia to come (still).
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