Letizia Trinco works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nilgiri Archaeological Project (2021-2026). She has a background in history of art and archaeology of South and Central Asia. She holds a BA and a MA in Oriental Languages and Cultures from the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, where she also obtained her PhD (2015). Her dissertation focused on a variety of South Asian funerary artefacts commonly referred to as “hero-stones”, based on evidence from Maharashtra.
She participated in the Uzbek-Italian Archaeological Mission to the site of Uch Kulakh, in the oasis of Bukhara, Uzbekistan (2009), and conducted several surveys in India between 2013 and 2019, predominantly in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, as part of her research activity at Sapienza University of Rome. In particular, as a research collaborator, she conducted a preliminary study of the 20th-century visual and material culture associated with satī cults in northwestern India. In the frame of a one-year postdoctoral fellowship, she engaged in the analysis of the Nilgiri Hills' variations of “hero-stones” and dolmens.
Her research interests encompass funerary rituals and memorialisation in ancient South Asia, religious iconography (Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina), and, increasingly, the theory and practice of ethnoarchaeology.
Within the Sangh research group, she will also contribute to the projects Excavations at Bodhgaya, the Site of the Buddha's Enlightenment (2021-2024) and Archaeological Explorations and Investigations in the Gangetic Plains and Neighbouring Regions (2021-2025).