aspects of Smithsonian operations. He also encouraged digitization projects, such as the National Air and Space Museum's videodisc technology for storage and retrieval of documents, photos, and other information. The "culture wars" arrived at the Smithsonian in 1991, with criticisms of The West as America, an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1994, Science in American Life, at the National Museum of American History, provoked outcries from the scientific community for its critical look at American science. And the first script for the Enola Gay exhibit in the National Air and Space Museum was completed shortly before Adams's departure. Later life Adams retired from the Smithsonian after ten years of service in 1994 and returned to academia as an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. He received a Distinguished Service Award from the Society for American Archaeology in 1996 and continued his fieldwork and research in the archaeology and anthropology of the Middle East. Scholarly research 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. Over the course of his career Adams has emphasized the importance of social interaction and cultural ecology in the evolution of civilizations. His research has explored how cultural ecology can help explain the rise of civilizations and how cultures affect each other. 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. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1970, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1974. In 1988, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Adams received the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in