About

Professor Adam T. Smith is the Director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) and is actively involved in the Landscapes and Objects Laboratory (LOL) at Cornell University. His work focuses on the analysis and interpretation of archaeological materials, emphasizing the role of the material world—from landscapes and places to assemblages and singular artifacts—in human social life. Professor Smith collaborates with graduate students and researchers on projects that utilize advanced techniques such as portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) to investigate cultural heritage objects, including ancient coins and illuminated manuscripts. His leadership in these interdisciplinary projects integrates archaeological science with cultural heritage research, contributing to the understanding of ancient forgeries, pigment composition in historic artworks, and the materiality of archaeological collections. Through his directorship and research activities, Professor Smith supports the LOL as a resource for students and researchers, fostering innovative studies that bridge archaeology, art history, and materials science.

Research topics

• Archaeology
• Geography
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Biology
• Physical geography
• History
• Demography
• Ecology
• Ancient history
• Law

Selected publications

• Agro-pastoral landscape fire suppression in the steppes of the Bronze and Iron Age southern Caucasus.

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2024-08-28

  article

  International audience

  Publisher

• Monitoring Heritage At Risk:

  Archaeopress Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2023-03-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Early Bronze Age obsidian networks: A view from Project ArAGATS

  ARAMAZD Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies · 2022-12-31 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As a testimonial to Ruben Badalyan’s indelible contributions to the archaeology of the South Caucasus, this paper presents the results of a portable X-ray fluorescence study of a large sample of securely provenienced Early Bronze Age obsidian artifacts and debris from the excavations of Project ArAGATS, the collaborative program of archaeological research that we co-founded a quarter of a century ago. Statistical analyses were performed on a corpus of 467 pXRF assays of materials from the sites of Gegharot and Aragatsi Berd, located on the northeast flank of the Tsaghkahovit Plain of central Armenia. The results shed important new light on changing resource exploitation strategies over time that may be indices of variable homelands for Gegharot’s settlers. Moreover, variation in exchange networks across Gegharot’s topographically defined sectors indicate differential participation in regional exchange networks by contemporaneous households. Taken together, the results of this study indicate that the material homogeneity of Kura-Araxes villages like Gegharot need not suggest a lack of variability in daily experiences, social networks, and exchange relationships.

  PublisherDOI

• Diverse dietary practices across the Early Bronze Age ‘Kura-Araxes culture’ in the South Caucasus

  PLoS ONE · 2022 · 11 citations

  • Geography
  • Biology
  • Archaeology

  The Kura-Araxes (KA) cultural phenomenon (dated to the Early Bronze Age, c. 3500/3350-2500 BCE) is primarily characterised by the emergence of a homogeneous pottery style and a uniform 'material culture package' in settlements across the South Caucasus, as well as territories extending to the Ancient Near East and the Levant. It has been argued that KA societies practised pastoralism, despite a lack of direct examination of dietary and culinary practices in this region. Here, we report the first analyses of absorbed lipid residues from KA pottery to both determine the organic products produced and consumed and to reconstruct subsistence practices. Our results provide compelling evidence for a diversified diet across KA settlements in Armenia, comprising a mixed economy of meat and plant processing, aquatic fats and dairying. The preservation of diagnostic plant lipid biomarkers, notably long-chain fatty acids (C20 to C28) and n-alkanes (C23 to C33) has enabled the identification of the earliest processing of plants in pottery of the region. These findings suggest that KA settlements were agropastoral exploiting local resources. Results demonstrate the significance of applying biomolecular methods for examining dietary inferences in the South Caucasus region.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unseeing the Past

  Current Anthropology · 2022 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Archaeology has recently been described as a means of “bearing witness” through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed. But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a program of mass murder enacted by the collapsing Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people and the dislocation of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The genocide continues to define regional politics as a century of denial by the Turkish government strains international relations. Even as an increasingly vocal cadre of historians has grappled with the legacies of collective violence in the region, foreign archaeologists working in Turkey have increasingly avoided the material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the discipline. The disappearance of Armenians from international archaeological accounts of the region effectively co-opts the discipline as a functionary of the Turkish government’s historical revisionism. This study combines close readings of works from international archaeology’s archive with interviews with foreign archaeologists to better understand the discipline’s understudied practices of unseeing.

  PublisherDOI

• Civilization Machines: Value and Recognition on the Armenian Highland from the Bronze Age to Today

  Scottish Archaeological Journal · 2022-02-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article provides a summary of the Dalrymple Lectures delivered November 18–21, 2019. It examines the troubled, and troubling, idea of ‘civilization’, charting a path toward rehabilitation not as a descriptive category but as an analytic concept. Returning to the term's 18 th century origins, civilization here describes neither a state of being nor a set of personal qualities but an apparatus, a machine that generates recognition by setting the material terms for who is like and who is Other. It does so through the generation of at least three forms of value – metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical. By retheorizing civilization as a means instead of an ends, as an apparatus that generates the values at the heart of large-scale publics instead of an exclusionary monumental aesthetic, new analytic terrain is opened for a discredited term. The operation of civilization machines is interrogated through studies situated in the South Caucasus and Armenian Highland that extend from the Early Bronze Age to the present.

  PublisherDOI

• The Project ArAGATS Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey, Armenia: Report of the 2014–2017 Seasons

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2022-03-15 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  During four field seasons spanning 2014 through 2017, Project ArAGATS (Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) expanded our long-term research on the origins and development of complex political systems in the South Caucasus with a comprehensive study of the upper Kasakh River valley in north-central Armenia. The Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey employed both systematic transect survey of 43 km2 and extensive satellite- and drone-based reconnaissance to accommodate the complex topography of the Lesser Caucasus and the impacts of Soviet-era land amelioration. Though our survey was animated by questions related to the chronology and distribution of Bronze and Iron Age fortifications and cemeteries, we also recorded Paleolithic sites stretching back to the earliest human settlement of the Caucasus, Early Bronze Age surface finds, and historic landscape modifications. Concurrent to the survey, members of the ArAGATS team carried out test excavations at select settlement sites and associated burials, and a series of wetland core extractions, with the goals of affirming site occupation sequences and setting them within their environmental context. This report provides an overview of the results of these multidisciplinary activities.1

  PublisherDOI

• The human and climate drivers of Holocene grassland fires in the South Caucasus: A macro-charcoal, brGDGTs, and pollen reconstruction

  2021-03-04

  preprintOpen access

  <p>The mountainous area of Armenia has been a steppe throughout the Holocene with a rich history of fire events throughout this period. Previous research has found that changes in fire are linked to shifts between Poaceae grasslands and semi-arid Chenopodiaceae steppes. However, the climate and human drivers of these fires has yet to be fully explored in an area where agriculture has been practiced for almost 8,000 years. To elucidate these changes, we performed and compiled macro-charcoal analysis on four wetland sediment cores from the Kasakh Valley, Armenia. We aimed to understand fire frequency, intensity, size, and drivers of these events. In addition, we utilize a paleotemperature molecular biomarker branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs), a pollen climate reconstruction for temperature and precipitation, and the vast amount of archaeological data to help us untangle these changes. Early results suggest fires increase as temperature rose during the early Holocene and continue to increase with temperature during the Mid-Holocene despite an increase in agriculture during the Early Bronze Age. Between 4000 - 2000 cal. BP fires are small and almost disappear from the record. During this period these declines appear to be driven both by temperature fluctuations and an increase in regional mobile pastoralism resulting in declining biomass. Over the last 2000 years, humans appear to be the primary driver of fires with an increase in large intense events that are local to the watershed.</p>

  PublisherDOI

• The vegetation, climate, and fire history of a mountain steppe: A Holocene reconstruction from the South Caucasus, Shenkani, Armenia

  Quaternary Science Reviews · 2020 · 45 citations

  • Physical geography
  • Geography
  • Ecology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Project ArAGATS 1998-2018: Twenty years of archaeological investigations into the Bronze and Iron Ages of Armenia

  ARAMAZD Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The year 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, a collaboration more parsimoniously known as Project ArAGATS. The project was originally conceived as an effort to define long-term processes of social, economic, and political change in the South Caucasus across the Bronze and Iron Ages at a regional scale. In addition to introducing methods of intensive systematic survey to the region, the work of the project has unfolded in an integrated series of excavations conducted across multiple sites and bolstered by a wide range of analytical techniques. The result has been not only new data on the ancient South Caucasus but also a new model for the practice of international collaborative research in archaeology.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The Fortress and the Grassroots: Archaeological Investigations of Early Complex Societies on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia

  NSF · $155k · 2010–2011

Frequent coauthors

• Ruben Badalyan

  National Academy of Sciences of Armenia

  15 shared

• Lori Khatchadourian

  Ithaca College

  11 shared

• Ian Lindsay

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  10 shared

• Lucas Dugerdil

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  7 shared

• Odile Peyron

  Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier

  6 shared

• Sébastien Joannin

  Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier

  6 shared

• Amy Cromartie

  Cornell University

  6 shared

• Alan Greene

  Institute of the Black World

  5 shared

Labs

• The Landscapes and Objects LaboratoryPI

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  University of Arizona

  1996

Awards & honors

• Historic Ithaca Preservation Award for the exhibit Sacred Gr…
• Fellow, Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, Cornell…
• Finalist, Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year, So…
• Certificate of Communal Partnership, St. James AME Zion Chur…
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2010-2011)