Mycenaean Histories: Breaking and Reassembling the Late Bronze Age with Dimitri Nakassis

The Department of Classics invites you to a lecture by Professor Dimitri Nakassis (Classics, University of Colorado Boulder) titled Mycenaean Histories: Breaking and Reassembling the Late Bronze Age. The event will take place on Monday, February 10 at 5:00 pm in Dodd 248, and all are welcome! For more information, please see the flyer above and the description below.

Description: The cultural labels that we use to study the ancient world – like “Mycenaean,” used to describe the Late Bronze Age world of the Greek mainland (ca. 1650-1075 BCE) – are an inheritance of 19th-century ways of thinking. These labels do more damage than we have appreciated. Not only do they derive from an intellectual project shaped by nationalism and race science, but they also distort our interpretations by imposing a singular frame onto our evidence. This paper attempts to take initial steps towards an archaeology of the Late Bronze Age that begins by rejecting the essential unity of the Mycenaean world and tries to reassemble its study as a heterogeneous patchwork of discrete practices and fields of action, each with their own histories and logics.