Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers
Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers (PhD, University of New Mexico, 2023) is a Senior Archaeologist/Principal Investigator for the Southwest region at Chronicle Heritage. He is also the President of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico. He specializes in the archaeology of the southern American Southwest/Mexican Northwest region and Casas Grandes, Jornada Mogollon, Mimbres, and southeast Arizona, and, in particular, social complexity in intermediate societies and the construction of identity in cultural borderlands. His research focuses on the late prehispanic Casas Grandes culture of northwestern Chihuahua and its cultural manifestations and interactions with groups throughout the International Four Corners (where Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora meet). He is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, compliance reports and contributions, book reviews, and newsletter contributions with key research articles published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, American Antiquity, Kiva, Journal of Arizona Archaeology, and Pottery Southwest, among others.
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Articles by Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers
Archaeological interpretations for the seemingly sudden introduction of new types of material culture or cultural practice often include attribution to the arrival of a migrant population as part the construction of a periphery or frontier zone. In the International Four Corners area of the American Southwest/Mexican Northwest, archaeologists often correlate the ascendancy of Paquimé in the late thirteenth century CE with the development of a northern periphery in southwestern New Mexico. Simultaneously, sites in far southeastern Arizona became partially integrated into the Salado phenomenon. I evaluate architecture, settlement, and mortuary data from 26 sites with respect to existing models. Given ongoing historian discourse regarding Indigenous borderlands during European colonization, I advocate a model enabling the occurrence of borderlands construction prior to colonization and lacking a predominate hierarchical society. I conclude that the inhabitants of the International Four Corners region situated themselves within multiple inter- and intra-regional zones of interaction and that existing models of frontiers and edge regions are inadequate to address the variability present, but that of the borderlands does as it recognizes relationships to adjacent culture cores as influential but also centers the local inhabitants and their agency.