This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies—not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales—Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—this study introduces the concept of “frontier nostalgia” to analyze how these spaces function as sites of both economic opportunity and memory. While aspirations for prosperity drive individuals to engage with these dynamic zones, their lived experiences are marked by significant historical residue, creating a poignant longing for past vibrancy—and particularly for a form of hypersociality that characterize(d) frontier spaces. By examining the lived realities of Chinese migrants, the paper argues that nostalgia is not merely a counterpoint to forward-looking anticipation. Instead, it complements future-making practices and imaginaries by highlighting the complex emotional landscapes that characterize frontier encounters, hence constituting particular frontier subjectivities. In Pianma, remnants of a timber boom evoke a sense of melancholic yearning for lost sociality; in Mong La, vibrant social interactions coexist with developmentalist dynamics; and in the burgeoning Golden Triangle SEZ, rapid transformation echoes and actively resemble past experiences. Ultimately, this comparative analysis emphasizes how nostalgia shapes both individual identities and collective memories within these transient spaces, shedding further light on the experience of life on the frontier.

A copper-alloy spear-shaped mount, found during excavations at the extramural settlement at Inveresk Roman fort, represents a rare British example of a beneficiarius lance symbol. Stylistic parallels are found among a corpus of personal ornaments used by soldiers of the beneficiarii and are typically restricted to sites on the German limes. This paper discusses the style and function of this object and what its presence reveals about Inveresk and its role in the administration and control of Roman Scotland.

Although culture contact is a well-studied area of archaeological inquiry, complex ancient cross-cultural interactions can be challenging to discern. As zones of innovation in which boundaries are obscure, ancient frontiers offer ideal contexts to analyze the nuances of such interactions. To address the challenges of interpreting a multicultural frontier in the Moquegua Valley, southern Peru, we apply a practice-based approach using foodways to elucidate the complexity of culture contact between Wari-affiliated and Indigenous Huaracane communities during the Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000). Our findings indicate that after Wari colonization of the Moquegua frontier, the Huaracane community at Yahuay Alta began brewing chicha de molle, an alcoholic beverage associated with and central to Wari political and religious social structures. They did not, however, adopt the practice in a completely Wari fashion. Instead, we see Huaracane leaders brewed and served chicha de molle in ways that aligned with their own cultural practices. The material remains of chicha de molle production and consumption at Yahuay Alta should not be seen as a simple adoption of a nonlocal cultural practice by an Indigenous group, but instead an active manipulation of practice as part of frontier cultural negotiations and entanglements.

This article examines historical perceptions of the territorial extent of Bod, the Tibetan toponym for ‘Tibet’. In a bid to establish what area second-millennium authors (and audiences) may have pictured when this toponym was invoked, we analyse instructive passages from five historiographical works, mostly dating from between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The rough-hewn maps of Bod ‘Tibet’ that emerge from this procedure differ quite radically from one work to the next, and at times even between different passages from a single source. While one work may see ‘Tibet’ as the territory directly centered on the Tibetan Plateau’s south-central river valleys, another source may forward an image of a ‘Tibet’ that is thrice as large. Works may also allow for shifts in its borders from one political period to the next, or incorporate multiple incongruous territorial descriptions. This material helps answer what ‘Tibet’ meant in different periods and places, and to different people—questions that have only poorly been studied outside of modern political history. One relevant finding, among others, is that the notion of a ‘Tibet’ that covers a large part of the Tibetan Plateau, incorporating for instance sites in contemporary eastern Qinghai, was not in fact a modern innovation.

This article explores the peculiarity of struggles over memory in Soviet-era planned cities in the Russian Far East. It focuses on the contested history of Permskoe, a village founded by peasant settlers from European Russia in 1860, which was later subsumed by Komsomolsk-na-Amure, an urban industrial center constructed in the Stalinist period in the 1930s. Built with the participation of Young Communist League volunteers recruited from across the Soviet Union, the city was held up as a symbol of the triumph of socialist modernization throughout the twentieth century. But following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the city suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes, with a massive outflow of residents and resources leading to an economic crisis that also occasioned a crisis of identity. One manifestation of this crisis is an initiative seeking to recalculate the city’s age based on the date of Permskoe’s founding. This proposal has been denounced by many residents as an attempt to erase the city’s Soviet history and to downplay the role of communist volunteers in the city’s construction. Drawing on the debates which erupted around this periodization controversy, I argue that the collapse of the Soviet imaginary of linear progress and inability to articulate a new frontier myth resulted in “asynchronous belonging,” characterized by radical polarization around memory and irreconcilable allegiances to different moments in local history.

This essay considers how insights into the dynamic, interconnected, and high-stakes nature of frontier markets resonate with current disruptions in global commodity networks. In the book Unsettled Frontiers (Cornell University Press, 2022), I argue that the tangled social and material networks that constitute frontier markets are prone to rupture—a characteristic that holds significant implications for frontier landscapes and communities. Such processes of rupture—consequential and unequal in their effects—are evident in the disruptions we now see in the wake of Covid-19 and the broader unfolding of our current nature–society crisis.

This article explores the widespread phenomenon of anti-colonial movements that relied on magical rituals for protection against European weapons. It examines both the beliefs of the magical practitioners themselves, and those of colonizing observers whose fascination with stories of “primitive magic” contributed to their contrasting self-representations as superior beings in possession of technological wonders. North America’s Ghost Dance movement, China’s Boxer Rebellion, and East Africa’s Maji Maji uprising took place on three different continents but occurred almost simultaneously. The cases come from a narrow period of time, roughly 1890 to 1910, during a peak of colonial violence all over the world.

Hadrian's Wall remains one of the most iconic elements of Roman frontier infrastructure, with considerable symbolic capital in all kinds of contemporary situations and representations. Whether inspiring the fictional ice wall in Game of Thrones or illustrating debates about English–Scottish relationships in Brexit-era Britain, the Wall has a powerful legacy. In more scholarly circles, the Wall sometimes figures in the literature of the emerging field of Border Studies, too, and in this paper I examine some of these representations, as a prelude to discussing what Border Studies offers to Wall studies within Roman archaeology. While the interdisciplinary nature of Border Studies can mean that Hadrian's Wall is misunderstood when taken out of context, this does not mean that the broader insights of Border Studies have no value to Roman archaeologists in better interpreting the Wall and its place in Roman Britain. To the contrary, the combination of innovative theories of frontiers and borderlands with detailed, nuanced understanding of the Wall communities through time has much to offer the archaeology of Britain in the Roman empire. Indeed, this field has the potential to connect frontier studies better with other dimensions of Roman provincial archaeology than has been typical in our discipline over much of the last half-century.

This article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others, these figures were held responsible for a series of raids carried out in the settled British territories of the northeastern frontiers in the 1890s. After a few inconclusive skirmishes with the British expeditionary force, they were apprehended and imprisoned in a jail in Hazaribagh under the preventive detention act of Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which was reserved and designed to arrest political dissidents of the empire. After a few months, two of them, Liengpunga and Khalkam, were found hanging from the windows of their prison latrine. The British administration labelled these deaths as suicides and closed the cases. The article opens them up. In doing so, it narrates an oblique history of the Scheduled District Act of 1874 which removed hill districts from the jurisdictions of regular courts. By focusing on the historical imbrication of Bengal Regulation III of 1818 in the Scheduled District Act, the article highlights the punitive techniques embedded in the seeming protectionist impulse of the colonial state, something that persists in India's administration of the Northeast region. Closer to the concerns of this issue, it reflects on a legal genealogy of tribal subjects in South Asia.