Departmental News

Posted:  May 21, 2021 - 12:00pm

Thatcher Rogers (PhD Student, Archaeology) has been awarded a Friends of Coronado Historic Site scholarship this spring, an excellent local scholarship that funds research along the Middle Rio Grande.  Thatcher has also received an NSF subsidy grant from the MURR (University of Missouri Research Reactor) Archaeometry Laboratory, which will support his dissertation research.

Abstract

How do societies living on the edges of more complexly organized groups engage with the material culture of these groups and, by extension, with the groups themselves? Around the globe, the expansion of complex societies into adjacent areas has resulted in substantial, long-term impacts through processes such as colonization and globalization. Previous research has explored these processes through a focus on how cultural cores engage with adjacent areas. Yet, choices by inhabitants within these peripheral areas on how to interact with one or more cultural cores may provide key insights into identity formation in borderland regions. Specifically, this NSF-subsidy award enables the geochemical analysis of over 500 ceramic sherds from sites in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, northeastern Sonora, and northwestern Chihuahua; thereby, bridging across the contemporary US-Mexico Border. By understanding how past borderland groups engaged materially with cultural cores, this project contributes to ongoing discussions of the relationship between social identity and cultural heritage in borderland regions. Additionally, this project improves narratives for the ancient American Southwest/Mexican Northwest region by connecting processes along and south of the US-Mexico Border to concurrent and better studied regions of the Southwest.