Richard and I were excited to get our old friend and regular listener Dimitri Nakassis on the Caraheard podcast this past week. He was a good sport and talked with us for well over an hour about his research and Late Bronze Age Greece.
- We began by teasing Dimitri (and me) about some of our famous car failures, including this epic accident (no one was hurt).
- To really understand his work, check out his book: Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Brill 2013). Here is some really basic information on Linear B.
- Dimitri mentions Richard’s paper at the Metron conference many years ago, here’s a link to it.
- One of the places that this paper identified as a likely location for Mycenaean settlement is the site of Korphos on the Saronic Gulf. It was published here (pdf).
- If you want more Nakassis and don’t feel like springing for the book, check out this YouTube clip called, Rethinking the Mycenaean World, and this one, titled “Cities and Thrones and Powers: Rethinking the End of Mycenaean Civilization.”
- We mention Eric Cline’s recent book; it has a trailer. We also mention the work of Jared Diamond.
- We also mention the Patricia McAnany and Norm Yoffee book called Questioning Collapse (2010) and Robin Osborne’s book Greece in the Making 1200-479 BC (1996).
- We discuss the artificial nature of the divide between the Mycenaean period (or the Late Bronze Age) and the early Iron Age and refer to Sarah Morris and John Papadopoulos. This divide is sometimes called the Greek Dark Ages. Here’s what John Papadopoulos thinks of it and in this article he says: “What is a mirage is the Dark Age and the deliberate distance maintained between the second millennium and the culture of classical Greece.”
- We talk about Alan Wace and Carl Blegen.
- We talk briefly about INSTAP and the East Crete Study Center.
- Finally, Dimitri talks about his work using RTI to document the Linear B tablets here.
Caraheard 