Adam T. Smith

Adam T. Smith is Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, Cornell University. He is also co-founder (with Ruben Badalyan) of The American-Armenian Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) and co-director (with Lori Khatchadourian) of The Aragats Foundation.

Smith received an M.Phil. from Cambridge University (1991) and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona's Department of Anthropology (1996). He was then a member of the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows from 1997-2000 before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Beginning in the Fall of 2011, Smith joined the faculty of the Cornell University's Department of Anthropology where he served as Department Chairperson from 2014-2017.

Smith's research is dedicated to the archaeology and anthropology of the South Caucasus, particularly the area of modern Armenia, where most of his work has been focused. His work investigates "the role that the material world—everyday objects, representational media, natural and built landscapes—plays in our political lives".

Smith is a winner of a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship

Books

• The Political Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus' (Princeton, 2015)
• The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions' (Cambridge, 2012)
• The Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, Volume 1 (OI Press, 2009)
• Social Orders and Symbolic Landscapes" (with Charles Hartley and Laura Popova, CSP, 2007).
• Beyond the Steppe and the Sown" (with David Peterson and Laura Popova, Brill, 2006).
• The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (California, 2003)
• Archaeology in the Borderlands: Investigations in Caucasia and Beyond (with Karen S. Rubinson, Cotsen Institute, 2003)