book Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (1981) in which Adams established an almanac of modern and ancient climatic conditions and agricultural productivity in Mesopotamia as a natural and technological setting for further investigation. The interaction between human beings and their environment resulted in an early urbanism in which city-states attempted to achieve stability over an often politically autonomous and resilient countryside. As the larger and more centralized states of late antiquity were able to maximize the production of cereals and other crops, they minimized the flexibility of a pastoralist-urban life and increased the potentialities of salinization, which turned land into swamps and brought about a massive demographic decline. A classic scenario of increasing short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival is played out to a sorrowful end.

Adams’s work has shown that in all the superficially mundane activities of locating sites, seriating objects, and connecting them to stratified material and reconstructing settlement patterns—the very stuff of archaeology—the subject of social change could be apprehended. Today, archaeologists devise survey projects of great sophistication and detail and through their work have transformed our knowledge of regions throughout the world. Although Willey in Peru and William Sanders and colleagues in Mexico were also pioneers of systematic settlement surveys, Adams’s work has arguably had the greatest impact on this form of research. Adams not only explored the relation between environmental and human social systems better than others but also analyzed and dignified the activities of the archaeological worker in two ways that became critical in the late twentieth century, both to archaeologists and to their colleagues.

First embedded in the intellectual milieu of anthropologists and historians and often regarded more as technicians than as thinkers, archaeologists corporately earned respect through the persuasive intellectuality of Adams’s work. His research is judged to be an original contribution to social knowledge and, in particular, to social evolutionary theory. Adams’s research emanates from arduous fieldwork and the synthesis of disparate fields of expertise whose breadth no one else has been able to match or, it seems, even imagine. Second, Adams’s work has never given the impression of being dispassionate scholarship that is disassociated from the world in which his research was done and that has nothing to say to the people of Iraq or to the makers of modern western policy.

In 1984, at the height of his distinguished career at the University of Chicago—where he had been a professor in the Oriental Institute (and its sometime director), professor of anthropology, dean of the division of social sciences, and provost of the university—Robert Adams became secretary of the smithsonian institution in Washington, D.C., and served in that position until his retirement in 1994. While at the Smithsonian, Adams was also on the staff of the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. After his retirement from the Smithsonian he became adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.

Norman Yoffee

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 808–810.

Africa, East, Later

Research on the later archaeology of East Africa has ranged from the need to understand the late Pleistocene and Holocene artifact traditions and linguistic groups in the region (Bower, Nelson, Waibel, and Wandibba 1977; Isaac, Merrick, and Nelson 1972; L.S.B. Leakey 1931, 1935; M.D. Leakey 1945; M.D. Leakey and L.S.B. Leakey 1950; Phillipson 1977a, 1977b, 1985; Soper 1971a, 1971b; Sutton 1966, 1972), the reconstruction of the environmental changes for the period based on analysis of pollen cores from highland lakes and limnological analysis of lakes in the area (Butzer, Isaac, Richardson, and Washbourne Kamau 1972; Isaac, Merrick, and Nelson 1972; Livingstone 1980; Hamilton 1982; Richardson and Richardson 1972), the techniques of artifact making (Kiriama 1986;