Michael E. Smith Home Page

I am an archaeologist specializing in the Aztecs of central Mexico. My professional title is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (formerly known as the Department of Anthropology) at Arizona State University. I have directed fieldwork projects at Aztec sites in the Mexican state of Morelos and in the Toluca Valley, and I have published several books and numerous scholarly articles on this work.

My research focuses on Aztec social and economic organization, and on the comparative analysis of ancient urban societies. My theoretical and comparative interests derive from a materialist, political-economy approach to ancient state societies. I have published on topics of urbanism, imperialism, households, and economic organization. Current projects include assembly of the final publications on my Morelos excavations, fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca, and work on comparative urbanism.

What's New:
"Urban Organization Through the Ages: Neighborhoods, Open Spaces, and Urban Life." This transdisciplinary project started in September, 2008, and we have an incipient web site.
So-called "urban societies" in the Amazon. Science rejected my letter to the editor complaining about the use of the term urban by Hackenberger et al. to describe Amazonian villages. See the letter here. I have also blogged about the problems when idiosyncratic definitions of common concepts are promoted by scientific journals.
I am uploading pdfs of my papers to the Selected Works site. There are not as many posted yet in comparison to my own dowloads page, but they are nicely organized by theme and it looks much nicer than my own messy pages.
The Anthropology Newsletter botched my statement on comparative archaeology. The Newsletter turned this joint statement signed by 12 archaeologists into a "letter to the editor" with only my name (thus defeating much of the purpose of the document). You can see the original statement here.
See a list of books by Michael Smith that I did not write.

Grad study in archaeology at ASU. The SHESC web site is being rennovated, and in the meantime there is information on the graduate program here. For a downloadable pdf flier on the grad program Click Here.

I have two blogs: Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project ; and: Publishing Archaeology Blog
The Calixtlahuaca Project has an incipient Calixtlahuaca Web Site