Adam Smith, Ph.D.,
University of California, Los Angeles, Institute of Archaeology
 

After an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford, Adam Smith lived in China for eight years, graduating with an MA from the Archaeology Department of Peking University. He continued his graduate education in the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 2008, with a dissertation entitled “Writing at Anyang: the role of the divination record in the emergence of Chinese literacy.”

The dissertation and his ongoing research concern the emergence and evolution of the Chinese writing system during the late second and first millennia BC, and the early literate activities with which it was associated. He is interested in institutions for scribal training, the link between incipient Chinese literacy and the recording of divination, the beginnings of textual transmission, the cognitive implications of the transition to literacy, and linguistic reconstruction of the early stages of the Chinese language.

Currently, Adam is working on a book entitled "Diviners and Scribes: Early Chinese Divination and its Written Record.”

Adam has taught modern and classical Chinese language at UCLA, a course on the “Origins of Writing in China” at Stanford University, and is teaching Major Topics in East Asian Civilization at Columbia.

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