1
Introduction
THE GEOGRAPHY OF NORTH AEGEAN ECONOMIES
A short history of explorationWhen Léon Heuzey directed a‘mission’to northern Greece over two
years, between 1855 and 1857, he was masterminding a pioneering
venture on several counts. This was the first coordinated, scientific
project in the region that aimed to document information about import-
ant historical locations in a structured way. Heuzey’s activities were
conducted under the auspices of the École française d’Athènes, founded
in 1846, but his project was funded by the Emperor of France, Napoleon
III. This generous subvention enabled thefirst results of his investiga-
tions to appear in print promptly, in 1860, with the title:Le mont Olympe
et l’Akarnanie, exploration de ces deux régions. In the following year, he
was active again in thefield, with a new programme of excavation close
to the township of Palatitsa (now incorporated into the modern city of
Vergina), where Heuzey explored traces of a royal palace below a forti-
fied acropolis on the western slopes of the Pierian moutains. The results
of these subsequent studies were published, in collaboration with
H. Daumet, asMission archéologique de Macédoine, in 1876, including
a splendid topographic plan of the ancient remains that he and his team
had identified—the palace, cemeteries with individual mound-covered
tombs, and the two closest contemporary settlements, called Koutles and
Barbes, overlaid on the irregular terrain, broken by ravines, extending
from the mountain slopes down to the River Haliakmon. Heuzey’s
topographic plan has yet to be superseded. The project in the township
of Palatitsa, and its immediate environs, was one of the most successful
pieces of targeted investigation in the Balkans before the emergence of
modern nation states in this area.
The third quarter of the nineteenth century was a critical period in the
development of the institutional background of historical research in the