Kidder

Department of Anthropology

      Department of Anthropology
      Washington University
      Campus Box 1114
      One Brookings Dr.
      St. Louis, MO. 63130
      tkidder@wustl.edu

My research over the past 15 years has focused on archaeological study of the evolution of human societies in the Southeastern United States. I have been especially interested in the emergence of social ranking, the development of domesticated food crops, and the causal (or potentially causal) relationship among and between these variables. I have also been exploring the relationship between humans and the dynamic landscape of the alluvial valley of the Mississippi Valley. My interest in geoarchaeology has led me to undertake studies of the evolution and chronology of the Holocene Mississippi River using archaeological data. My studies have also led into the fields of historical ecology and, more recently, climate history.
I am currently studying the hypothesis that global climate change ca. 1220-400B.C. affected populations throughout eastern North America. Evidence comes from extensive geological and soils mapping, archaeological and stratigraphic investigations, and an intensive program of coring. This work is ongoing and will be expanded in the next few years.
Another long-term interest is to explore the nature of social evolution in Native American societies with the goal of understanding the circumstances that led to periods of greater or lesser social and political complexity. The emergence and decline of mound building among Middle and Late Archaic cultures in eastern North America is an example of the waxing and waning of seemingly complex behavior that I want to explore in greater detail. Towards this end I am working at several Middle to Late Archaic mound sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, including the well-known Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana.

Climate, Culture, and Human History; Feast or Famine: The archaeology of Climate Change; Geoarchaeology; Ceramic Analysis

Selected Publications

1998	Mississippi Period Mound Groups and Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar, edited by R. B. Lewis and C. Stout, pp.123-150. University of Alabama Press.
1998	The Rat that Ate Louisiana: Aspects of Historical Ecology in the Mississippi River Delta. In Advances in Historical Ecology, edited by W. Balée, pp. 141-168. Columbia University Press, New York.
2000	The Lower Mississippi Valley. In The Woodland Southeast, edited by D. Anderson and R.C. Mainfort, Jr., pp. 65-91. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
2000	Mapping Poverty Point. American Antiquity 67: 89-101.