limited range of ceramic items among the 56 tombs excavated by the
Franco-Bulgarian team between 2002 and 2004.^25 The preference for
modest tomb inventories is more characteristic of coastal‘colonial’sites
than of indigenous northern ones. Many coastal communities, whose
funerary traditions were more closely tied to wider Aegean practices,
display a greater preference for simple burial or cremation in pits or cists,
while the principal social emphasis was on standing memorials. Funerary
stelai, with simple inscriptions of a name and patronymic, or the same
accompanied by a short text, are the commonest memorials from coastal
settlements. The more pretentious have carved relief sculpture. Memor-
ial stones were beginning to become fashionable infifth-centurybc
Macedonia, but at Aigeai there was a preference for painted rather
than carved stelai.^26 Funerary monuments of the stele form were
comparatively rare in inland Thrace before the Macedonian conquest
and the earliest surviving specimens may have belonged to visiting
merchants.^27
The sheer proliferation of mortuary evidence from inland tombs and
cemeteries has become ever more apparent as research has developed in
the last half century, and as new burial sites have been discovered in
advance of planning and development projects. Many of the built tombs
have been looted much more thoroughly than the Stenomakri tomb,
making it hard to evaluate what the original mortuary ritual involved.
Comparison between looted and intact burials in inland Thrace suggests
that looters were mainly interested in gold and silver vessels, which could
easily be melted down, rather than bronze or iron utensils; although
weapons and, to some extent, complete pieces of ceramicfine ware
vessels may also have been an attraction for collectors.^28 Sheet bronze
and iron rarely survive well below ground, so the prodigal amounts of
good quality metal that were put out of use in the burials of leading
individuals, as exemplified in the Stenomakri tumulus, is significant.
Recent discoveries have enlarged the range and quality of known tomb
finds in significant ways. Painted sarcophagi and a greatly enlarged range
of gilded silver vessels are among the notablefinds, although the extra-
ordinary portrait head of Seuthes III represents one of the most unusual
(^25) Hermary 2010, 143–65.
(^26) Saatsoglou-Paliadeli 1984 for a conspectus ofstelairecovered from thefill of the
‘Great Tumulus 27 ’.
Domaradzka 2005, 24fig. 9 (steleof Antiphanes, son of Herandros, from Parvenets,
near Plovdiv, dated to the late 28 fifth–early fourth centurybcby the author).
Archibald 1998, 241 andfig. 10.1 (bar chart of contents of 75 selected tomb
inventories).
Continuity and commemoration 311