The Omaha-Lincoln Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), in partnership with
Creighton University's Department of Fine and Performing Arts and Joslyn Art Museum, continues its exceptional programming with another free public lecture.
"Apocalypse Then: The Collapse of the Bronze Age World” presented by Dimitri Nakassis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, University of Colorado-Boulder
Around 1200 BC, palaces burned across the eastern Mediterranean, from
the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece to the flourishing towns of the
Levantine coast to the city of Troy itself. The Mediterranean never
fully recovered from this catastrophe, and why this happened is anyone’s
guess. Theories include marauding invaders, climate change, internal
rebellion, and natural disasters. This paper argues that to understand
this collapse, we cannot lose sight of the local and the regional, and
examines developments in southern Greece to try to understand some of
the forces that transformed this part of the world forever.
Dimitri Nakassis is a classicist transforming our understanding of
prehistoric Greek societies. His rare intellectual breadth, comprising
philology, archaeology, and contemporary social and economic theory, has
equipped Nakassis to challenge the long-held view that Late Bronze Age
Mycenaean palatial society (1400–1200 BC) was a highly centralized
oligarchy, quite distinct from the democratic city-states of classical
Greece.
Instead, he proposes that power and resources were more
broadly shared. This thesis, developed in his first book,
Individuals
and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (2013), is derived from a meticulous
reinterpretation of Pylos’s administrative and accounting records (found
on clay tablets and written in the early Greek script, Linear B).
Standard interpretations of the tablets suppose a rigid political
structure in which a small group of palace elites controlled and
distributed all resources. Nakassis re-examined this model using a
traditional method, prosopography, but through the lens of contemporary
theoretical discussions of agency and structure. He determined that some
recurrences of a personal name refer to the same individual playing
multiple, sometimes competing, roles. This insight offers an alternative
picture of the Mycenaean world as a more open society with a dynamic
and competitive economic structure that displays some similarities to
the democratic polis of classical Greece.
Nakassis is testing his
hypothesis through an archaeological survey, the
Western Argolid Regional Project, that will reconstruct the settlement history of a core
region of the Mycenaean world from prehistory to modern times and
clarify how Mycenaean states mobilized labor, incorporated peripheral
communities, and expressed power over many centuries. He is also
co-directing a new study of the Linear B tablets from Pylos that
includes the use of digital imaging technologies (three-dimensional
scanning and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, a kind of computational
photography) to produce high-quality print and digital editions of
these important documents for the first time. Nakassis’s multifaceted
approach to the study of Bronze Age Greece is redefining the
methodologies and frameworks of the field, and his nuanced picture of
political authority and modes of economic exchange in Mycenaean Greece
is illuminating the prehistoric underpinnings of Western civilization.
Dimitri Nakassis is Associate Professor with the Department of Classics, University of Colorado, Boulder, and was previously with the University of Toronto. He holds his degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D. and M.A.), and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (B.A.), and his areas of specialization include Greek archaeology, especially the Late Bronze Age, Linear B and early writing systems, and survey archaeology. Professor Nakassis is co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project, and his recent publications include KE-RA-ME-JA: Studies Presented to Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, co-editor, (Prehistory Monographs 46, INSTAP, 2014), and Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Mnemosyne Supplements, History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity 358, 2013). Professor Nakassis was named a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellow for his work on transforming our understanding of prehistoric Greek Societies.
Founded in 1879, the
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) was chartered by the United States Congress in 1906, in recognition of its role in the development and passage of the Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt signed into law that year. Today, the AIA remains committed to preserving the world's archaeological resources and cultural heritage for the benefit of people in the present and in the future. The Lincoln-Omaha Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, chartered in 1995, provides the residents of Nebraska and western Iowa opportunities to attend lectures by prominent international, national, and local archaeologists.