UMass Boston

Paleoethnobotany, American Southwest, colonialism, environmental archaeology

PhD, University of Michigan

Heather Trigg is a Research Scientist at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Using paleoethnobotany and paleoparasitology, she explores the intersection of foodways and landscape with processes of colonization, diaspora, and urbanization. She is also interested in the development of Latinx identity in the American Southwest during the 17th and 18th centuries, a period when Spanish colonizers adapted to the challenging environment of New Mexico and developed relationships with the Indigenous people who lived there. She is a former editor of the Journal of Ethnobiology, author of the book From Household to Empire: Society and Economy in Early Colonial New Mexico, and author of such articles as Spanish Use of Plants and Animals in Early Colonial New Mexico, Archaeological Parasites as Indicators of Environmental Change in Urbanizing Landscapes, and Spanish-Pueblo Interactions in New Mexico’s Seventeenth-Century Spanish Households: Negotiations of Knowledge and Power in Practice.

She also teaches courses and advises students in the Historical Archaeology Graduate (M.A.) Program.