Dimitri Nakassis is an archaeologist and classicist in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder and studies the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1600-1100 BC). He has developed new methods for investigating individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts and argues from this evidence that Mycenaean society was far less hierarchical and much more dynamic than it had been considered in the past. He also works on Homer and Hesiod, Greek religion and history, archaeological survey, Linear A, and the economy, society and prosopography of the Mycenaean world, and is currently writing a second book tentatively entitled “Mycenaean Histories” which is a polemic against the traditional study of the Mycenaean palaces.
He is co-director (with Sarah James and Scott Gallimore) of the Western Argolid Regional Project, a diachronic archaeological survey in southern Greece, and co-director (with Kevin Pluta) of the Pylos Tablets Digital Project, which involves the digital documentation of all the administrative documents from the “Palace of Nestor” at Pylos. He occasionally writes about archaeology and the Aegean Bronze Age on his personal blog.
He received his degrees from the University of Michigan (BA 1997) and the University of Texas at Austin (MA 2000; PhD 2006); He has taught in Classics departments at Trinity University (2006-7), Florida State University (2007-8), and the University of Toronto (2008-16). In 2015 I was named a MacArthur fellow.