Adam T. Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the Co-Director of the American-Armenian Collaborative Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) and has conducted field research in Armenia since 1992. The investigations of Project ArAGATS, focused in the Tsaghkahovit Plain to the north of Mt. Aragats, have been supported by a variety of public and private institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society. The results of this research have been published in both popular and scholarly journals and contributed to an exhibition in the Yerevan State Museum in 2004 on contemporary research in Armenia. Dr. Smith is the author of The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Societies (University of California Press, 2003) and co-editor of Archaeology in the Borderlands: Investigations in Caucasia and Beyond (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2003).

Dr. Smith received his BA degree in Anthropology and Political Science from Brown University in 1990 followed by an M.Phil. degree in Social and Political Thought from the University of Cambridge in 1991 and an MA degree in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1993. In 1996, Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Michigan as a post-doctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 2000.