Bruce Trigger
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Bruce Trigger OC OQ FRSC |
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|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
June 18, 1937 Preston, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | December 1, 2006 (aged 69) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline |
Archaeology Anthropology Ethnohistory |
| Institutions |
Northwestern University McGill University |
Bruce Graham Trigger, OC, OQ, FRSC (June 18, 1937 – December 1, 2006) was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian.
Born in Preston, Ontario, he received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. His research interests at that time included the history of archaeological research and the comparative study of early cultures. He spent the following year teaching at Northwestern University and then took a position with the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, and remained there for the rest of his career.
He was arguably best known for The Children of Aataentsic, his two-volume study of the Huron peoples, a work which remains the definitive study on the history and ethnography of that people. The Children of Aataentsic earned Trigger numerous accolades, including adoption by the Huron-Wendat Nation as an honorary member. Trigger would later reiterate some of the key arguments of the book in Natives and Newcomers, a polemical work aimed at educating laypeople. In Natives and Newcomers Trigger, writing in the tradition of Franz Boas, argued that the colonial and Aboriginal societies of early Canada all possessed rich and complex social and cultural systems, and that there are no grounds to argue that any society of early Canada was superior to the others.
Trigger's book A History of Archaeological Thought investigates the development of theory and archaeology as a discipline. A second and expanded edition was published in 2006.
In Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study Trigger uses an integrated theoretical approach to look at the meaning of similarities and differences in the formation of complex societies in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang of China, Aztecs and Classic Maya of Mesoamerica, Inka of the Andes, and Yoruba of Africa. In 2004 a session at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference was dedicated to the research of Bruce Trigger.
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