half-century, many European societies have ceased to have a close
working relationship with animals. Horse- and donkey-drawn vehicles
are an occasional source of wonder; mules are even rarer, and even
farmyard animals a curiosity. It needs an effort of the imagination to
repopulate these landscapes with trains of mules,flocks of sheep and
goats, and herds of cattle and horses, to say nothing of the lions, leopards,
lynxes, panthers, and boars that Xenophon assured his readers were
plentiful in Thrace at least (Xen.Cyneg.11.1; cf. Pl.NH21.17; Ael.
Hist. An.3.21). Xenophon did not mention bears, which still roam
Mount Rhodope. Bears’teeth have certainly been found in the Thracian
Plain at Adjiyska Vodenitsa, in the foothills of Rhodope.
The evidence from Angelochori, and from other sites in Macedonia
and Thrace during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, shows that arable
cultivation co-existed with pastoralism and the hunting of wild species.
However, the evidence does not reveal how cultivation and pastoralism
worked alongside one another. In principle animals may pasture on
marginal land away from cultivatedfields; but most scholars accept the
existence of a symbiotic régime, in which animals moved across arable
land after harvesting and made use of marginal or uncultivated resources
farther away from cultivated areas when crops were growing.^106 If
animals move across ploughedfields they consume the weeds of cultiva-
tion and their manure contributes to a more productive humus than is
produced from a biennial fallow regime.
The nature of pastoral regimes in classical antiquity has aroused much
debate over the last half-century. The scholarly focus during the late
1970s and early 1980s on pastoralism as the dominant regime of the
Early Iron Age played a role in the formulation of Hammond’s theories
about the origins of the Macedonians. Nicholas Hammond used a model
of extended transhumant pastoralism between Epirus and Macedonia to
connect three elements that contributed to his understanding of the
culture of Macedonia in thefifth and fourth centuriesbc—Herodotus’
story about the founding rulers of Macedonia (8.137–139); the closeness
of the Macedonian dialect to north-west Greek; and Hammond’s per-
sonal knowledge of the geography of Epirus and western Macedonia.^107
(^106) Hodkinson 1988; Forbes 1995, 332; Halstead 1996; Margaritis and Jones 2008b,
160 – 1.
(^107) See Ch. 2 n.20 on Hdt. 8.137–39; Hammond,HM I, 415–16, 439;HM II, 28; cf. also
Hatzopoulos 1996, I, 105:‘a group of transhumant shepherds, who for generations had
tended theirflocks on both the western and eastern slopes of the Pierian mountains, hardly
distinguishing themselves from their Elymiot brothers across the Haliakmon, seized the old
Phrygian settlement of Edessa, established their seat there, renaming it Aigeai, and became
sedentary’;‘The peoples of upper Macedonia were ethnically, economically, socially,
182 Thelongue duréein the north Aegean