Heather Trigg

Heather Trigg serves as Senior Scientist at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research within the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she supervises the paleoethnobotany laboratory and teaches Archaeological Field Methods and Environmental Archaeology.

Her research program investigates colonialism and human-environment interactions through innovative archaeobotanical and parasitological analyses. Key focus areas include:

• 17th-century Spanish colonialism in New Mexico, examining settler-Indigenous household dynamics and economic transformations
• Environmental change indicators in urbanizing landscapes and their health/social status implications
• Comparative studies across the American Northeast/Southwest, Iceland, Germany, Iran, and Mongolia

Dr. Trigg's work is supported by National Science Foundation grants including the Human Impacts Pollen Database project. Her influential publications such as From Household to Empire: Society and Economy in Early Colonial New Mexico demonstrate how colonial encounters reshaped ecological systems and social hierarchies through material evidence analysis.

She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 and maintains active field research programs examining the long-term impacts of colonialism on human-environment systems through plant and parasite remains.