Reassembling Mycenaean Greece, ca. 1650-1075 BCE

FAIN: FEL-289643-23

Dimitri Nakassis
University of Colorado, Boulder (Boulder, CO 80303-1058)

Research and writing leading to a book that challenges the historical periodization of ancient Greece and the historical construction of Mycenaean Greece as a unified, homogeneous world in 1650-1075 BCE.

My book project, Reassembling Mycenaean Greece, ca. 1650-1075 BCE, proposes a new way of understanding the Mycenaean world, the name traditionally used to describe the archaeological culture of mainland Greece in the Late Bronze Age. I show that interpretations premised on its essential unity have failed to account for our evidence and demonstrate that they are also defective on theoretical grounds. I propose breaking its study down into specific practices whose histories can be traced temporally and spatially, and then reassembling these to produce rich, textured historical understandings. This approach contributes to recent postcolonial work in ancient history and archaeology by undermining the reductive role that Mycenaean Greece plays in discussions about the emergence of the citizen-based city-states of 1st millennium BCE Greece and productively resituates it in its broader Mediterranean context.