Without close geographical knowledge, any study of economies is
bound to be deficient. We need not just to see and comprehend how
people in the remote past perceived their environment and utilized
what they saw, either for their own use, or for exchange with others.
We also need to have some means of evaluating how these transform-
ations operated in space and time; how clay and stone and ores were
transformed into bricks, masonry, and metal; which commodities moved
by mule and cart to the nearest locality, and which travelled for weeks
because they had special value. None of these mechanistic simulations
is particularly meaningful unless we take a further step and try to
discover why so much human effort was devoted to the cultural mani-
festations that give the east Balkan regions their distinctive historical
character. The environment that we discover, as twenty-first-century
observers, was structured through a symbiosis between peoples and
their landscapes. This is why Heuzey’s grand publications, which marry
contours with monumental remains and living communities, still have
lasting value.
Since the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the east Balkan region has
been trisected by modern state boundaries. The area that constitutes the
focus of this book has therefore been explored, by modern scholars,
within three different cultural environments (four if we include the
FYROM); three or more independent institutional frameworks, operat-
ing, for much of the last century, under starkly differing ideological
regimes. Until comparatively recently, these regimes constituted separ-
ate, virtually vacuum-sealed academic traditions, publishing research in
different languages and journals, preoccupied with quite distinct abstract
problems, whose direction and colouring was shaped by national Acad-
emies of Sciences and national research programmes. The administrative
district of Macedonia was incorporated into the Greek state only in 1913,
Thrace in 1923. Field research along this coastal strip of the north
Aegean has caught up with other parts of Greece only since the 1980s.
Mapping of the kind undertaken by Heuzey was resource-intensive and
gave way, during the twentieth century, to more geographically restricted
projects. In Bulgaria the energetic studies of the early 1900s, expanding
over the next half century, were succeeded in the 1950s by new trends,
which drew archaeologists and ancient historians away from topograph-
ically orientatedfieldwork to theoretically inspired approaches, influ-
enced by Soviet historical materialism. The project to map the country’s
archaeological sites, set out in a programmatic statement by the partici-
pants in a national Conference of Archaeological Societies in 1913,
generated a series of volumes until the 1960s, then languished, until it
Introduction 5