powers in the Mediterranean region gave historical research particular
immediacy and relevance in this period.
Economy and environmentEconomies, historical or contemporary, involve the manipulation or
transformation of material resource. Economic activities also have non-
material dimensions, in terms of expertise and technical skills, but these
do not exist in isolation. In the remote past, skills were intimately
connected with the processing and exchange of commodities. In the
second half of thefirst millenniumbc, the range of natural resources
exploited in the Balkans—cereals, market gardening, stock rearing,
mining, clay extraction for pottery and brick making; leather and other
animal by-products; textiles and woodwork, as well as a wide range of
foodstuffs—expanded and developed on a considerable scale. These
activities built on, and ramified from, the practices of earlier prehistory.
The consequences of what took place in thefirst millenniumbcwere of
critical importance for the economic architecture of early Medieval
Europe. Byzantion emerged as a key hub of east Mediterranean trade
in thefinal three centuries of thefirst millenniumbc, reinforcing the
north–south trajectory of traffic between southern Europe and the wider
Mediterranean, as well as acting as the bridge between Europe and Asia.
Most of this economic activity in the remote past was virtually
unknown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the
first systematic investigations of the region’s early history effectively
began. References to the mines and timber resources of Macedon and
Thrace were familiar to readers of Herodotus and Thucydides, and the
early fourth-centurybcinscription from Olynthos, according to which
the Macedonian king Amyntas III affirmed the rights of local Chalk-
idians to export timber as part of a mutual alliance, was published in
1883.^6 The investigation of Olynthos itself did not begin until the late
1920s and study of the Chalkidian peninsula as a whole has had to wait
until thefinal decades of the twentieth century.
(^6) The Thasians drew 80 talents a year from the mine at Skapte Hyle/Syle (Hdt. 6.46.3);
the miners of Mount Pangaion were the Satrai, the Pieres, and Odomantoi (Hdt. 7.110, 111,
112 – 13). The Athenian tyrant Peisistratos took an interest in the mining activities of the
area (Ar.Ath. Pol. 15.2). The lucrative potential of the mines, and the timber resources of
the upland zone, were among the motives behind the Athenian siege of Thasos (Thuc.
I.100.2). Thuc. 2.97 for the revenues of the Odrysian kings; alliance of Amyntas III and the
Chalcidians: SIG^3 135; Hatzopoulos 1996, II, I; RO 12 (dated 390s–380sbc); Millett 2010,
472 – 5. Mining resources are discussed in more detail in Ch. 4.
4 Introduction