Dimitri Nakassis

ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΣ ΑΝ. ΝΑΚΑΣΗΣ

 

I'm an archaeologist and classicist in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1600-1100 BC). I've developed new methods for investigating individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts and I argued from this evidence that Mycenaean society was far less hierarchical and much more dynamic than it had been considered in the past. I also work on Homer and Hesiod, Greek religion and history, archaeological survey, Linear A, and the economy, society and prosopography of the Mycenaean world, and I'm currently writing a second book tentatively entitled "Mycenaean Histories."

I'm 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. I occasionally write about archaeology and the Aegean Bronze Age on my personal blog.

I received my degrees from the University of Michigan (BA 1997) and the University of Texas at Austin (MA 2000; PhD 2006); I've taught in Classics departments at Trinity University (2006-7), Florida State University (2007-8), and the University of Toronto (2008-16). I've been named a College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts & Sciences of the University of Colorado Boulder (2024), and a fellow by the MacArthur Foundation (2015).

Dimitri at 7 Magic Mountains