| 1 | Name: | Dr. Robert McC. Adams | |
| Institution: | University of California, San Diego & Smithsonian Institution & University of Chicago | ||
| Year Elected: | 1974 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1926 | ||
| Death Date: | January 27, 2018 | ||
Robert Adams was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego at the time of his death on January 27, 2018, at age 91. He was also Director Emeritus of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution. Educated at the University of Chicago, he had a long-standing interest in the environmental, agricultural and urban history of the Middle East. Dr. Adams' conducted extensive field research from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s in southern Iraq, southwestern Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. This work, on which he has published extensively, sought to identify long-term patterns of change extending over the last six millennia. Another field of research interest and publication involves the contexts and history of technological change, concentrating on the last five centuries or so in western Europe and the United States. In 1996 he wrote Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology, which deals with how technology comes about and why or why not it has an impact on mankind. Dr. Adams served as Editor of Trends in American and German Higher Education (2002), which stems from his involvement in a comparison of graduate education and research in the United States and Germany. Robert Adams was the recipient of the 1996 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for American Archaeology, the 2000 Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal from the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the 2002 Gold Medal from the American Institute of Archaeology, and the 2003 Field Museum Award of Merit. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974. | |||