He identified and named the San Dieguito, La Jolla, Amargosa, and Yuman archaeological complexes (Rogers 1929a, 1929b, 1939, 1945, 1966; Warren 1966, 2013; Sutton 2013).
He also produced one of the earliest ethnoarchaeological studies of pottery-making among the surviving native peoples of his region (Rogers 1936; Panich and Wilken-Robertson 2013).
Rogers' contributions were sometimes confusing to his successors, as in the case of his changing nomenclature for the San Dieguito complex and its constituent phases.
His published observations, manuscript notes, and collections on aboriginal ceramics were never worked into a full-blown typology, and later analysts have interpreted them with markedly different conclusions (Schroeder 1958; May 1978; Van Camp 1979; Waters 1982a, 1982b; Seymour 1997; Burton and Quinn 2013).
Nonetheless, these formulations continue to be the starting point for most research in the region, and his observations of so much that has subsequently been lost from the archaeological record have become indispensable.