Adam T. Smith is a founder and the American co-director of Project ArAGATS. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago as well as a Faculty Associate in the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and the Center for East European/Russian and Eurasian Studies. Smith holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona's Department of Anthropology (1996) and an M.Phil. from the Social and Political Science Faculty at Cambridge University (1991). His research is currently focused on the emergence of complex societies in the South Caucasus and the materiality of political authority more broadly.
He is the author of The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (California, 2003) and co-editor of Archaeology in the Borderlands: Investigations in Caucasia and Beyond (with Karen S. Rubinson, Cotsen Institute, 2003) and Beyond the Steppe and the Sown: Proceedings of the 2002 University of Chicago Conference on Eurasian Archaeology (with David Peterson and Laura Popova, Brill, 2006). He is co-author, with Ruben Badalyan and Pavel Avetisyan, of the in press book The Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, volume I: Regional Investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia (Oriental Institute Press).