The Shell-Bearing Archaic in the Middle Cumberland River Valley

The Middle Cumberland River Valley (MCRV) of Tennessee comprises a unique regional environment that has continually supported human occupation along the natural river levees and adjacent terrace landforms since the Late Pleistocene. Over thousands of years Archaic period inhabitants of the MCRV harvested the invertebrate species that populated the streams and waterways of the region, using them for subsistence and raw materials and taking an active role in managing the riverine resources. The cumulative result of this process appears in the archaeological record as abundant and often-dense deposits of invertebrate zooarchaeological remains. However, few formal archaeological investigations have been conducted on Archaic shell-bearing sites in the region. In this field report we present initial results of site file analysis, radiocarbon dating, and species composition research in order to introduce the MCRV manifestation of the cultural phase traditionally known as the Shell Mound Archaic.     

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.