.

As a Southeastern anthropological archaeologist, I’m interested in how Native people and their places structured the earliest centuries of contact and colonialism in North America and how we as archaeologists influence that historical narrative. From my primary research in Western North Carolina, I apply a combination of anthropological and Indigenous theories with materials analyses to construct robust radiocarbon chronologies of Native political landscapes.

.

Publications

2024 Luke Auld-Thomas, Marcello Canuto, Adriana Velazquez Morlet, Francisco Estrada-Belli, David Chatelain, Diego Matadamas, Alex Juardo, Michelle M. Pigott, and Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz. “Running out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico.” American Antiquity. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.148

.
2022 Michelle M. Pigott. The Materiality of the Apalachee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Contact and Colonialism in the Gulf South. Southeastern Archaeology 41(1):53-73. DOI: 10.1080/0734578X.2022.2030891

.

2020 Christopher B. Rodning, Michelle M. Pigott, and Hannah Hoover. “Native American Responses to Spanish Contact and Colonialism in the American South,” in The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism, edited by Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass (eds) pp. 83-104, University of Arizona Press, Tucson. DOI:10.1353/book.74213.