Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers – “Between Casas Grandes and Salado: The Establishment of an Indigenous Borderland in the Late Prehispanic American Southwest/Mexican Northwest”

This lecture is offered through Zoom.

Beginning September 2023, AAHS monthly lectures will be held at the U of Arizona, ENR2, Room 107 and simultaneously broadcast through Zoom.

This lecture is free and open to the public but you must pre-register at: 

https://bit.ly/2023JuneRogersREG

While archaeologists continue to investigate processes of cultural contact and frontier construction in hunter-gatherer and small agricultural societies using models originally created for or applied to ancient states and modern geopolitical discourse, historians have recently begun investigating Indigenous borderlands. In this talk, I present my investigation into several spatially restricted culture areas along the US-Mexico border, including what archaeologists widely perceived to be a northern extension of the Casas Grandes culture, one of the most sociopolitically complex entities in the ancient American Southwest/Mexican Northwest. In so doing, I challenge prevailing interpretations of southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, northeastern Sonora, and northwestern Chihuahua, advocate the need for a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous power and transformation in a lesser studied portion of the American Southwest/Mexican Northwest, and provide insight into the potential for collections-based research to greatly improve historically under-evaluated portions of the Southwest/Northwest.

Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, the President of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico, a Research Associate with the Jornada Research Institute, and a Crew Chief for Aspen CRM Solutions. Seltzer-Rogers is a specialist in the archaeology of the southern American Southwest/Mexican Northwest region with an emphasis on the construction and transformation of Indigenous borderlands. He has extensively published on the region in American Antiquity, Kiva, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Arizona Archaeology, and Pottery Southwest, as well as nearly one hundred technical contributions and book chapters.

Suggested readings:

Borck, Lewis 2016 Lost Voices Found: An Archaeology of Contentious Politics in the Greater Southwest, A.D. 1100-1450. PhD dissertation, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Douglas, John E. 1995 Autonomy and Regional Systems in the Late Prehistoric Southern Southwest. American Antiquity 60(2):240-257

Douglas, John E., and A. C. MacWilliams 2015 Society and Polity in the Wider Casas Grandes Region. In Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World, edited by Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen, pp. 126-147. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.