Heather Pringle

Heather Pringle’s curiosity about the ancient world is part of her DNA. Her first short story, written at age eleven, explored the lives of ancient Egyptians during the Old Kingdom: her earliest published prose-in a junior high school newspaper-fictionalized the building of the royal Inca estate at Machu Picchu.

After graduating from the University of Alberta, Heather worked as a research assistant in the history and anthropology department at the Royal Alberta Museum. There she witnessed firsthand the reclaiming and spiriting away of an ancient medicine bundle by First Nations activists and elders–an incident that sparked her lifelong interest in Native cultures, both ancient and contemporary.

Over the past three decades, she has written features on archaeology and history for National Geographic, Discover, SCIENCE, Scientific American, New Scientist, Geo and Archaeology magazine. Her work has taken her into the back seat of an F-18 fighter jet flying upside 200 feet above the treeline, alongside archaeologists searching for the remains of Neanderthal children in a remote rockshelter in France, and inside the tomb of 1200-year-old Wari queens, who once wove with golden tools on Peru’s north coast.

Heather has written four books, including The Mummy Congress, an exploration of the quirky, off-kilter world of mummy research, and The Master Plan, a detailed examination of the sinister work of a World War II German archaeological institute.

Today she lives with her husband Geoff and their Labrador retriever in Victoria, British Columbia.
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