Thatcher Rogers, 2018-2019 Coinman Grant Award Recipient
10/16/2019
The GCAS is happy to have awarded funds through our group’s inaugural Nancy Coinman Grant Awards program for the 2018-2019 scholastic year to two graduate students of archaeology: Samantha (Sam) Bomkamp and Thatcher Rogers. They each have described the status of their research that our group’s Coinman awards helped support. Two days ago we published Samantha Bomkamp’s research summary; today we launch Thatcher Rogers’s progress report.
At the time of this writing Thatcher Rogers is a PhD student in Anthropology/Archaeology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is an experienced archaeologist of the southern New Mexico/northern Chihuahua region with expertise in ceramic analysis. He is also proficient at locating under-utilized museum collections and analyzing their data for potentially new insights.
The GCAS Coinman Grant Award funds helped Thatcher offset some of his transportation and related expenses in traveling from Albuquerque to a small museum in Ohio to investigate an extensive assemblage of artifacts from a 50-year-old avocational excavation at the Dutch Ruin (LA8706). The Dutch Ruin is a large, significant Cliff Phase (AD 1300-1450) pueblo in southwest New Mexico. The Ohio collection and associated documentation represent the only data that will likely ever become available to researchers given the extreme disturbances the Dutch Ruin site has suffered from decades of looting, erosion, and private land use.
Thatcher’s 2018-2019 project is part of his broader dissertation research that investigates the economic and societal relationships between the Casas Grandes (Paquimé) culture of northern Chihuahua and the Salado culture of southwestern New Mexico. Notably, the Dutch Ruin pueblo was also a quarry workshop and distributor of ricolite (a variety of serpentine), a trade commodity that circulated widely within southwestern New Mexico and into Casas Grandes territory. Thus Thatcher’s detailed analysis of the Dutch Ruin collection in Ohio may lead to more comprehensive interpretations of the regional relationships between the Paquimé and Salado cultures.
Congratulations are in order to Thatcher for his intensive archaeological research. We in the GCAS hope we hear from him periodically as his research and investigative reports continue into the future!
Click here to read Thatcher’s progress report online, or Download it in WORD format or Download it in PDF format.
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