Dimitri Nakassis (born 1975) is an American classicist and archaeologist, and is a professor at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

. He is also co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project. He was awarded a

MacArthur fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

in 2015.

Life

He graduated from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

with a B.A., and from the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

with a Ph.D.

Work

Nakassis's work focuses on the archaeology and scripts of Mycenaean Greece, in particular the administrative practices of the state. His findings are challenging assumptions that the

palace economy A palace economy or redistribution economy is a system of economic organization in which a substantial share of the wealth flows into the control of a centralized administration, the palace, and out from there to the general population. In turn ...

of Mycenaean Greece had little in common with the democratic

city-state A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...

s of

Ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of Classical Antiquity, classical antiquity ( AD 600), th ...

. Since 2013, he has co-directed a project using Reflectance Transformation Imaging to create detailed 3D images of the Linear B tablets found in the

Palace of Nestor The Palace of Nestor (Modern Greek: Ανάκτορο του Νέστορα) was an important centre in Mycenaean times, and described in Homer's ''Odyssey'' and ''Iliad'' as Nestor's kingdom of "sandy Pylos". The palace featured in the story of ...

References

External links

The Western Argolid Regional Project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nakassis, Dimitri Living people 1975 births MacArthur Fellows Academic staff of the University of Toronto University of Michigan alumni 21st-century American archaeologists University of Texas faculty Archaeologists of the Bronze Age Aegean