Robert McCormick Adams Jr. (born July 23, 1926) is a U.S. anthropologist.

Born in Chicago, he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1957, where he was also employed as a member of the faculty. He served as the provost of the University of Chicago from 1982 and 1984. He served as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. from 1984 to 1994. He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego.

As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Robert McCormick Adams has had a wide-ranging career spanning many fields. Geographically, his interests have involved extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, but have also included Mexico. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, he has studied the course of development of urban civilizations over many millennia, and he has also dealt with the history of technology. Partly as an outgrowth of decades of experience in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, he has until recently been involved in studies of multiethnic violence under the joint sponsorship of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Adams has proposed, based on his excavations in Mesopotamia, that there was no single condition behind the complex societies of ancient cities and states; they were a product of numerous interrelated conditions, especially social organization and craft specialization.

Works

• ''The Evolution of Urban Society'' (1966)
• Heartland of Cities (1981)

References

"Adams, Robert McCormick", Academic American Encyclopedia, 1991 edition, vol 1., p.97.