Jesse Obert

Jesse Obert completed his doctorate in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley in May of 2023. He also holds a Master’s degree from University College London in Ancient History and a Bachelor’s degree from Boston University double majoring in Classical Civilizations and Archaeology. Jesse has always been an interdisciplinary scholar, integrating historical, artistic, literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence into his research. This work frequently engages theoretically with political science, anthropology, disability studies, queer/gender theory, and ancient philosophy. He has worked on various archaeological projects in Greece and Italy since 2009, and more recently has been working as an archaeometallurgist at several sites in Greece. Within this subfield, he specializes in bronzeworking and ancient arms and armor.

Jesse Obert studies the political, economic, and social power of violence in ancient Greece, and the larger influence of warrior identities and inequality on the history of the Mediterranean. His dissertation compiled all the evidence for violence on the Greek island of Crete, where the earliest laws were inscribed in Europe and some of the earliest pieces of bronze armor emerged in the archaeological record. He used network analysis and machine learning within this data set to trace patterns over space and time. He argues that there were at least two distinct ideologies of violence on the island between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE that were tied to specific politically significant ritual spaces. Elites navigated these ideologies depending on their personal goals and political relationships within their home communities, and Cretan polities only started regulating how and where their community members could enact organized violence, i.e. warfare, in the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE – over a century after the earliest laws. He is currently working on the manuscript for his first book, as well as many other smaller projects in the fields of archaeology, archaeometallurgy, Greek history, Platonic studies, military history, and violence studies.