Bruce Trigger was a leading expert in three distinct fields of archaeology: as a historian of the discipline; as an Egyptologist; and as an authority on the aboriginal cultures of ancient North America. He placed archaeology as an academic discipline and a practice within a broader context of social and cultural evolution.
As a historian of his discipline, Trigger was best known for his monumental History of Archaeological Thought, published by Cambridge University Press in 1989; the 2006 revised edition, which appeared just before his final illness, was in many ways a new book. It critically analysed not only the distant history of antiquarianism from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the present day, but dissected the variety of current approaches to archaeology, including the “ processual”, “post-processual”, “critical” and “feminist” variants, with even-handed expertise.
Well, that's a shock. Not that he passed, but that it took so long to find out. The news articles I've found all go to Dec 1-3 or so, but I've not gotten any notifications about it.
Best wishes to his family and friends from ArchaeoBlog.