Most of Stamatakis's early life is obscure: he was born in the village of Varvitsa in Laconia, and had no university education or formal archaeological training.

After Schliemann's departure from Mycenae late in 1876, Stamatakis discovered additional tombs at the site, completed the excavation and organised the public exhibition of its finds.

[8] Almost nothing is known of Stamatakis's early life: he attended the demotic school of Varvitsa, which had only a single class of students, and took his graduation exams on 6 July [O.S.

[10] He was on the island of Melos in 1864, where he met a tomb-robber surnamed Nostraki and moved a Roman-period stele excavated there by him to Athens, also transcribing its inscription.

[11] In November and December 1864, he bought several looted artefacts on Melos, including coins, works of statuary and pottery, and transferred them to Athens.

[d] His primary task was to record antiquities held in private collections,[1] and so to enable the Archaeological Service to gain an understanding of the number and condition of ancient finds unearthed to date.

[18] During his early career, he seems to have had financial difficulties: he requested that his salary for August 1866 be paid to somebody by the name of Apostolos Verropoulos, possibly his creditor, and on 15 April [O.S.

3 March] 1875, he was given the post of ephor of the Peloponnese by the Archaeological Service,[27] which was at that time expanding its ranks to include a number of such officers.

In the royal decree establishing his position, Stamatakis was also listed as a graduate student of the University of Athens, though he may have attended lectures there informally rather than being officially enrolled.

[29] During the same year, he established the Archaeological Museum of Sparta,[26] building its collection largely from illegally-excavated artefacts recovered during his time in Laconia.

[36] From 1872 to 1873, he stayed on Delos to supervise the excavation of the French School at Athens at the sanctuary of Heracles, directed by J. Albert Lebègue.

16 November] 1872, he became a member of the Archaeological Society of Athens,[40] and in January 1873 he made another petition, to Panagiotis Efstratiadis and to Dimitrios Kallifronas [el], the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education, which was again refused.

4 March] 1874, Schliemann travelled to Mycenae, hired workers and made an illegal excavation, digging 34 test trenches around the site[44] and only stopping when forced to do so by the police, on Kallifronas's and Efstratiadis's orders.

Efstratiadis in turn stipulated that Stamatakis should serve as supervisor to the project, responsible for ensuring that Schliemann followed the terms of his permit and that the interests of the Greek state in preserving the antiquities were respected.

[47] The archaeological historian Dora Vasilikou has suggested that the Voulgaris government's greater receptivity to Schliemann's work was a function of the high levels of corruption prevalent within it.

[48] "Mr Schliemann, from the very beginning of the excavations, has shown a tendency to destroy, against my wishes, everything Greek or Roman in order that only what he identifies as Pelasgian houses and tombs remain and be preserved.

21 July] 1876, Valassopoulos confirmed Stamatakis as overseer of the excavation, and made clear that it was being treated as an operation of the Archaeological Society of Athens, for whom Schliemann was in effect working.

[43] Stamatakis kept a daily diary of the excavations, and supplemented this with regular reports to his superiors in the Greek government and the Archaeological Society.

[50] While Schliemann only visited the site, at least at first, in the mornings and evenings, Stamatakis remained throughout the day, supervising the work,[50] and it was he who took charge of the recording, sorting and processing of finds.

[53] Schliemann's behaviour, however, remained focused on completing the excavations as quickly as possible: he had expanded his workforce to a total of 125 workers by the time the stoppage concluded.

[57] In contrast to Schliemann's emphasis on speedily recovering the finds, Stamatakis sought to analyse the material and its stratigraphy fully before removing it: he attempted, for instance, to study the position and emplacement of the stelae above the shaft graves, in order to test a hypothesis that they might have been fixed in the ground considerably later than the burials they marked.

4 December] 1876: in a letter to Max Müller, he wrote that Stamatakis "would have made an excellent executioner",[63] and professed his determination never to excavate in Greece again.

[65] No securely-identified image of Stamatakis survives, and it has been suggested that Schliemann had him edited out of an illustration published in Mycenae as a consequence of their poor relationship.

[68] Following the observation of a trench to the south side of the Grave Circle, Stamatakis excavated and discovered, along with Vasilios Drosinos, Schliemann's surveyor,[44] the remains of the so-called "Ramp House", including a treasury of gold vessels, jewellery and a signet ring.

[70] Stamatakis would continue working at the site until January 1878,[69] aiming both to head off any possibility of looting and to ensure that Schliemann's excavations were properly finished.

He was also responsible in this period for the safe transportation of the antiquities found at Mycenae to Athens,[71] where they were stored, against Schliemann's protests, in the basement of the National Bank.

[72] At the end of December, it was agreed that they would be moved to a new display in the Polytechneion, which Stamatakis arranged, ordering the finds according to the burials with which they were discovered.

[87] Stamatakis was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens, in a tomb whose headstone was designed by Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a German architect and archaeologist who had assisted Schliemann with his excavations at Troy.