Major Field/Research Interests

Anthropological archaeology with specialization in prehistoric and early historic Indian cultures of North America. Topical interests include subsistence studies, paleoecology, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, climate change, geoarchaeology, landscape evolution, and ceramic analysis. Theoretical interests encompass the formation of hierarchical social systems, the emergence of social complexity, complex hunter-gatherer history, historical ecology, and the relationship between climate, landscape evolution, and human social change.

Research: The meta-narrative of my research focuses on the question: what causes people to arrange themselves through time into increasingly complex forms of social organization? This big picture question opens doors to a host of related ones: are there consistent patterns of historical development? What external forces bend the arc of human history? What are the internal processes within human societies that cause change or alter history?

With graduate students and collaborators I explore these and related issues through several different projects. One area of work is the archaeology of climate change. Our research in the eastern United States and in China is directed in this way. The problem domain 'is the question of causality. How, specifically, does climate change cause human social change?

In eastern North America we are looking at variable responses to large-scale climate events at or around the end of the Archaic period. We are testing the hypothesis that global climate change affected populations throughout eastern North America and played a significant role in the demise of the Archaic and the development of Woodland societies. Research in the Mississippi Valley has provided evidence for sudden and apparently catastrophic flooding ca. 3000-2500 cal B.P. Evidence for this flooding comes from research in the Tensas Basin of northeast Louisiana. This work is being expanded to other parts of the lower Mississippi Valley and to the Illinois River Valley.

In China we are looking at a very complex interweaving of climate change, human technological innovation, social system functioning, and local responses. We are working at the Han Dynasty Sanyangzhuang site investigating how people managed climate and environmental change. In response to changing climate and its effects on the Yellow River, the Han tried to manage the river through a complicated set of levees, dikes, reservoirs, and irrigation facilities. However, the Yellow River is part of a complex hydrological system and changes along the river influenced the success of this management system. One example is erosion upstream in the loess plateau that was caused by relocations of people into the region to form a buffer against external (Xiongnu) threats. Increased erosion caused by more people and intensive use of newly evolving iron agricultural technology led to massive sediment inputs that altered the Yellow River, possibly leading to more flooding or to a different flood regime. Thus, people living in the region had to respond to altered climatic, cultural, and technological forces.

We also do research on issues associated with "complexity." This takes two main forms. One, we are doing research on issues of hunter-gatherer complexity, especially at Poverty Point in Louisiana and Jaketown in Mississippi. The questions here are: what is the interplay of structure and practice in these societies that allowed them to create elaborate monumental earthworks or massive long-distance trade networks while lacking outward signs of hierarchy or stratification? A second area of interest is the construction of earthworks as materialized evidence of social organization and complexity. Work at Poverty Point and Jaketown is important but efforts at Cahokia and elsewhere are critical too.

We also do conventional archaeological research in the Southeast, mostly in the Mississippi Valley. We are winding down the Raffman project, which focused on late Woodland social complexity and organization. We are 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. Our interests in the complex interplay between climate, geology, history, and human agency lets us fit much of our research into the frameworks of landscape archaeology and historical ecology. As part of this work our research group conducts studies of the evolution and chronology of the Holocene Mississippi River using archaeological data.

Much of our work is focused in the realm of geoarchaeology. My own work emphasizes geomorphology in large river systems and the relationships between climate change, fluvial response, and human cultures. I also use geoarchaeological methods to study mound building. We run the geoarchaeology program as a lab-based project environment. Graduate students are involved in many of my projects and they publish with me or on their own. We have regular interaction with colleagues in Earth & Planetary Sciences-notably with Jen Smith who does geoarchaeology in North Africa (Egypt, Morocco), Arabia, and Slovakia. One fundamental way we interact is through the geoarchaeology reading group, which is open to all the grad students and convenes over coffee every other week.

Selected Publications

2006 Climate Change and the Archaic to Woodland Transition (3000-2600 cal B.P.) in the Mississippi River Basin. American Antiquity 71:195-231.

2006 Contemplating Plaquemine Culture. In Plaquemine Archaeology, edited by M. Reese and P. Livingood, pp. 196-205. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Arco, Lee J., Katherine Adelsberger, Ling-yu Hung, and Tristram R. Kidder

2006 Alluvial Geoarchaeology of a Middle Archaic Mound Complex in the Lower Mississippi Valley, U.S.A. Geoarchaeology 21: 591-614.

Adelsberger, Katherine A., and Tristram R. Kidder

2007 Climate Change, Landscape Evolution, and Human Settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 5500-2400 Cal B.P. In Reconstructing Human-Landscape Interactions, edited by L. Wilson, P. Dickinson and J. Jeandron, pp. 84-108. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Kidder, Tristram R., Katherine A. Adelsberger, Lee J. Arco, and Timothy M. Schilling

2008 Basin-Scale Reconstruction of the Geological Context of Human Settlement: An Example from the Lower Mississippi Valley, USA. Quaternary Science Reviews 27: 1255-1270.Tristram R. Kidder, Anthony L. Ortmann, and Lee J. Arco2008 Poverty Point and the Archaeology of Singularity. SAA Archaeological Record 8(5):9-12.

Kidder, Tristram R. and Kenneth Sassaman

2009 The View from the Southeast. In Archaic Societies: Diversity and Complexity Across the Midcontinent, edited by T. Emerson, D. McElrath, and A. Fortier, pp. 667-694. State University of New York Press, Albany.

Kidder, Tristram R., Lee J. Arco, Anthony L. Ortmann, Timothy M. Schilling, Caroline Boeke, Rachel Bielitz and Katherine A. Adelsberger

2009 Poverty Point Mound A: Final Report of the 2005 and 2006 Field Seasons. Louisiana Division of Archaeology and the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission, Baton Rouge.  [pdf]

Courses

Geoarchaeology (L48 372)
Meltdown: Archaeology and Climate Change (L48 379)
The Archaeology of Social Complexity (L48 4791)
Archaeological Theory (L48 5053)