Adam T Smith

Cornell University | CU · Department of Anthropology

Caucasus Heritage Watch is a research initiative founded in 2020 to monitor and document endangered and damaged cultural heritage using high-resolution satellite imagery. We strive to reveal visual evidence regarding past and present cultural erasure using the latest technologies of earth observation. Our purpose is to encourage accountability, inf...

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 tha...

In a year-long forensic investigation, CHW used high resolution satellite imagery to document the fate of Armenian cultural heritage sites in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan (Arm. Nakhichevan). To summarize our main finding, CHW's research shows the complete destruction of 108 medieval and early modern monasteries, churches, and ce...

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 Valle...

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...

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...

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 C...

It seems almost preordained that James Scott, a scholar who moves with profound agility between the worlds of anthropology and political science, should eventually work his way onto the intellectual terrain of the barbarian. Barbarians play a foundational role in the formation of both disciplines, populating both anthropology's ‘savage slot’ (Troui...

The South Caucasus occupies the divide between ancient Mesopotamia and prehistoric Europe, and was thus crucial in the development of Old World societies. Chronologies for the region, however, have lacked the definition achieved in surrounding areas. Concentrating on the Tsaghkahovit Plain of north-western Armenia, Project ArAGATS's multi-site radi...

Scott C. Smith . Landscape and politics in the ancient Andes: biographies of place at Khonko Wankane. 2016. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. - Volume 92 Issue 361 - Adam T. Smith

At a time when archaeology has turned away from questions of the long-term and large scale, this collection of essays reflects on some of the big questions in archaeology and ancient history - how and why societies have grown in scale and complexity, how they have maintained and discarded aspects of their own cultural heritage, and how they have co...

This concluding chapter returns to the overarching question that opened the Introduction—how do objects shape our political lives?—by drawing insights gained from the Bronze Age Caucasus into a wider reflection on the political work of things in contemporary moments of revolution and reproduction. It discusses the events leading up to Tunisia's Jas...

This chapter examines modernity's effort to banish objects from the production of social life alongside a series of counterprojects that have consistently smuggled things back into our thinking. The current “material” or “archaeological” turn in the human sciences represents only the most recent of these counterprojects, embracing multiple perspect...

This chapter works to define an object-aware account of sovereignty, one attentive to the articulations of human bodies and assemblages (and their distinct ways of working) rather than “oriented” explicitly to the object. The goal is not to provide a review of contemporary theories of sovereignty but to examine what happened to the political in arc...

In the Late Bronze Age, the polities in the South Caucasus developed a new assemblage directed toward transforming charismatic authority into formal sovereignty. This chapter examines the assembling of this political machine, which drew the civilization and war machines into an extensive apparatus of rule, one that resolved the paradox at the heart...

This chapter examines the role of things in the reproduction of a public—the first condition of sovereignty defined in Chapter 2—during the Early Bronze Age in the South Caucasus. “A public” here means a self-recognizing community that is not maintained exclusively through face-to-face interaction. It is thus in large part an assembly of strangers...

This chapter examines the breakdown and redevelopment of the civilization machine during the Middle Bronze Age alongside a fearsome new assemblage that is best described as a “war machine.” The operation of the war machine entailed not only the reproduction of political violence but also the dissection of social orders, severing a sovereign body fr...

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the conditions of sovereignty. It argues that sovereignty requires the continual reproduction of (at least) three conditions: (1) establishment of a coherent public defined by relations of inclusion and exclusion that are materially marked and regulated; (2) definition of a sovereign figure (whe...

Excavations conducted at the site of Gegharot in north central Armenia, along the northeastern margin of the Tsaghkahovit Plain (Aragatsotn region) have produced a large quantity of well-preserved charcoals. With occupations dating to the Early and Late Bronze Age, the site has been excavated since 2000 under the supervision of R. Badalyan and A.T....

The Political Machine investigates the essential role that material culture plays in the practices and maintenance of political sovereignty. Through an archaeological exploration of the Bronze Age Caucasus, Adam Smith demonstrates that beyond assemblies of people, polities are just as importantly assemblages of things-from ballots and bullets to cr...

The advent of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1250 B.C.E.) on the Tsaghkahovit Plain in central Armenia witnessed the establishment of a series of hilltop fortresses following a 900-year hiatus in regional occupation. These new settlements testify to the emergence of a South Caucasian political tradition founded on the regularization of radical inequ...

Geophysical techniques now available to archaeology have the potential to provide large-scale survey data that can map the buried structures of extensive and complex sites. Recent work at two Late Bronze Age hilltop fortresses in the mountainous volcanic terrain of Armenia provides an excellent illustration of their potential. Magnetometry revealed...

This report presents the results of the collaborative archaeological field investigations undertaken between 2008 and 2011 under the auspices of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS). Here we focus our discussions on investigations into the Bronze Age communities...

IntroductionConflicting Currents: Maikop and the Near EastOut of the Caucasus: The Kura-AraxesFragmentation and Fission: The Middle Bronze AgeComplex Encounters: The Late Bronze Age and Iron I PeriodConclusion Guide to Further Reading

Archaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in pr...

Adam T. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a co-founder of the joint American–Armenian Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS). He received a Ph.D. and MA from the University of Arizona's Department of Anthropology (1996) and an M...

Since 1998, Project ArAGA TS has conducted systematic investigations of the archaeological landscape of the Tsaghkahovit Plain in central Armenia. This contribution surveys the primary findings for three eras of extensive occupation of the region: the Early Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age, and the Iron 3 (Achaemenid) period. Of particular importanc...

The construction of large stone fortresses across much of northern Armenia during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1150 BC) represented a shift away from centuries of nomadic pastoralism, and also marked a profound transformation in the constitution of political authority and how social orders were mediated through the built environment. To date, howe...

For thousands of years, the geography of Eurasia has facilitated travel, conquest and colonization by various groups, from the Huns in ancient times to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the past century. This book brings together archaeological investigations of Eurasian regimes and revolutions ranging from the Bronze Age to the modern day...

Over the last two decades, there has been increasing attention to community archaeology, an archaeology which acknowledges the impact of archaeological research upon the communities among which it is conducted. Doing fieldwork has tangible effects upon the people we work among: archaeologists provide employment, spend money locally, negotiate local...

Between 2003 and 2006, the joint Armenian-American project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) conducted three major field seasons (2003, 2005, 2006) of archaeological investigations on the Tsaghkahovit plain of central Armenia. The Tsaghkahovit plain is a high elevation intermontane plateau set b...

Matthew Johnson's engaging paper raises a number of critical issues for contemporary archaeological reflection. The paper takes as a given the existence of archaeological theory as a disciplinary tradition of scholarly engagement, as a social fact of the vita archaeologica. But Johnson resists, rightly I think, the temptation to define 'the archaeo...

This article traces the development of archaeological inquiry in the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, from its antiquarian roots in the 19th century, through the Soviet era, and into modern times. The resurgence of western attention in the region since the end of the Cold War has been driven by collaborative research projects from the United Stat...

This paper examines the intellectual traditions and recent advances in the archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Ages of the South Caucasus. The first goal of the paper is to provide an account of the scholarly traditions that have oriented research in the region since the mid-nineteenth century. This discussion provides a detailed case study of an ar...

I recently attended a lecture here in Chicago given by Mkrtich Zardaryan, a colleague of mine from Armenia who specializes in the archaeology of early Armenian kingdoms during the post-Urartian 1st millennium B.C. During the question-and-answer period, a member of the audience posed the following question, which I paraphrase: ‘I recognize that we w...

Archaeological investigations of identity have successfully challenged traditional accounts of archaeological subjects by splintering social worlds along axes of gender, ethnicity and class. However, in so doing, they have quietly reinscribed an essential archaeological subject as a locus of analysis and as a foundation for contemporary political a...

The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.) in southern Caucasia marked the first appearance of a radically altered regional sociopolitical tradition founded upon newly empowered elites sequestered in fortified citadels. The archaeology of the era indicates a significant break from the preceding Middle Bronze Age, when large burial mounds and a dearth...

How do landscapes-defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the built environment, the aesthetics of form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representations-contribute to the making of politics? Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic remains of early complex societies, this provocative and...

In recent years, archaeological discussions of agency have relied quite heavily upon Pierre Bourdieu’s rendering of doxa in discriminating between those phenomena resulting from habit and those from active intention. However, doxa presents considerable problems for archaeological analyses as it rests upon a troubling theory of history and fails to...

Walled fortresses set atop rock outcrops and hills are the dominant settlement type documented in archaeological investigations of late second/early first millennium B.C. southern Transcaucasia. These sites arose as centers of the emerging complex polities in the region, marking not only the expansion of social inequalities but the formalization of...

Walled fortresses set atop rock outcrops and hills are the dominant settlement type documented in archaeological investigations of late second/early first millennium B.C. southern Transcaucasia. These sites arose as centers of the emerging complex polities in the region, marking not only the expansion of social inequalities but the formalization of...

In the early eighth century B. C., Argishti I, King of Urartu, conquered southern Transcaucasia and began a dramatic transformation of the local landscape into an instrument of imperial authority. This article details the changing spatial organization of political power on the Ararat and Shirak plains from the emergence of the earliest states in th...

Thesis (Ph. D.in Anthropology)--University of Arizona, 1996. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 454-486). Photocopy.

Landscapes represent social differentiation: they are the site and the stake of struggles over power. A critical approach to spatial analysis has as its central task exploration of the ways in which particular spaces are committed to ensuring social reproduction. That such a perspective can inform on the nature of political power beyond the West is...

Michel Foucault's genealogies, due to their reliance on Nietzschean accounts of the violent origins of human culture, present a problematic description of the emergence of patterns of resistance and domination. By creating a parallel fiction of emergence that replaces Nietzschean originary violence with Richard Dawkins's account of the centrality o...