coherence and partly a reflection of current research, which has exposed
the trajectories explored here most clearly. In future other configurations
may well be revealed alongside them.
The east Balkan—north Aegean regionIn the case of the east Balkans, evidence for the intersection of historical
with ecological and economic dynamics is surprisingly rich and varied.
We may include the direct political links between the kingdoms of
Macedonia and Thrace; those between individual cities; and between
cities and kingdoms. Political connections are rather better represented
at inter-state level than those of a more local kind.^22 More distant
contacts evidently required a more transparent, lasting set of signifiers;
hence the production of documents in stone, which record alliances,
agreements, and the terms applicable to them. Local exchanges operated
within the parameters of various higher-level agreements, so can rarely
be tracked in a direct way, except by certain kinds of inorganic objects, or
by the existence of routes and tracks that were indispensible to traffic.
One of the single most powerful material indications of traffic across this
region is the distribution of wineamphoraefrom the island of Thasos.^23
Thasian wine was among the four most widely distributed varieties in the
eastern Mediterranean between the fourth and second centuriesbc.
Current analyses of the volume of this traffic, and of its destinations,
suggests that the east Balkan region, from lower Macedonia in the west to
the Danube estuary in the far north-east, formed a regular, iffluctuating
pattern of recipients and partners for many centuries. The broad param-
eters conditioning this traffic were shaped by Aegean-wide trading rela-
tions. Changes within the large-scale conditions of trade facilitated the
emergence of these regional markets in thefirst place and also deter-
mined the demise of this traffic in the second centurybc. What did the
Thasians exchange for wine? The answers to this question have varied as
historians and archaeologists have increasingly refined their knowledge
of local production and brought a wider range of activities into consider-
ation. These answers will be reconsidered later in this chapter.
Modern ways of thinking about the history of the Balkan peninsula are
strongly shaped by the region’s organization in Roman Imperial times.
Pausanias, whoseGuide to Greeceis undoubtedly the most complete and
(^22) Reger 2011, 368–9; for an earlier analysis of the internal traffic of the Odrysian
kingdom, see Archibald 1998.
(^23) Tzochev 2010, and forthcoming.
14 Introduction