should be included in an economic landscape of the remote past. Reflect-
ing on what may have been the boundary conditions in any situation
allows us to think more carefully about the kinds of assumptions we
make about a historical context and to incorporate these in an explicit
way in the scenario we want to use.
Recent research in the coastal zone south of Rhodope has shown that
close study of the rural landscape can be very revealing when we want to
gain a better understanding of how different social entities responded to
each other’s presence. Below we will look at Abdera, Thasos, and Samo-
thrace, which together offer quite different perspectives on local inter-
actions and allow the idea of‘boundary conditions’to be explored in
specificways.Theevidence,documentaryandmaterial,aboutthetwo
separate waves of newcomers at Abdera; about the changing relations of
the nucleated community, its neighbours, and more distant partners alike,
tells us a good deal about this community’s relative success over the whole
of ourfive hundred year period. The arrival of Parian settlers on Thasos,
the progressive integration of native Thracians into the new Thasian polity,
and the joint development of enterprises on the mainland opposite, provide
the most complete model for understanding how communities that were
initially peripheral to the region managed to develop such successful
economic relations over a huge slab of territory. Samothrace is different
from either of the former, with its focus on the Sanctuary of the Great Gods
and a less visible, but no less penetrating relationship with the mainland.
The modern historiography of the north Aegean has been and in many
ways continues to be dominated by the paradigm of colonization, despite
the fact that colonization and its close cognate,‘colonialism’, have been
ascribed to a‘a myopic reading of ancient literature, a long-sighted failure
to discern the patterns which archaeology [has] revealed’.^13 The concept of
‘boundary conditions’involves a wholly different way of thinking about
socio-economic relations from the one-sided paradigm of colonization.
Historical events do indeed feature in this enlarged canvas, but so do
other kinds of singularities. Rule-based parameters, such as those created
through formal agreements, naturallyfind their place, but so do natural
processes, whether climatic, geomorphological, or biological. Only some of
these were dominant at particular moments in time and our three contexts
provide a variety of case studies. Horden and Purcell adopted the twin
terms‘intensifications’and‘abatements’tocoverawiderrangeofevents
and processes that can be discerned from ecological perspectives of Medi-
terranean history, terms that are compatible with what I propose here.^14
(^13) Purcell 2005b, 134. (^14) Horden and Purcell 2000, 263–70.
254 The lure of the northern Aegean