access to it. The proximity of timber for shipbuilding constituted another
major attraction. The principal waterways and overland coastal plains
enabled corn and human resources to be transported with comparative
ease from the continental interior. The same areas were used for inten-
sive horse and cattle rearing, and were therefore among the most valu-
able sources of large breeds of animal stock. Seen from this perspective,
close study of older evidence can yield new information. Nevertheless,
some of the innovative cultural phenomena that we now recognize in
Macedonia, Thrace, and the Propontis would have been hard to identify
without the discoveries of recent decades.
Urban development in the east Balkan region during the late twentieth
and start of the twenty-first century makes it easier to understand what the
structures of everyday life were like in classical antiquity, in part because
modern development also leads to the discovery of ancient remains, but
also because we can conceive other ways of landscape use that may be
directly applicable to the remote past. The comparative underdevelopment
of large parts of the west and east Balkans in early modern and more
recent times has encouraged the creation of historical models of settlement
in antiquity that make rural and ephemeral forms of community life the
dominant ones. This tendency has encouraged a perception that social
units in the northern Balkans were fundamentally different from those in
the rest of the peninsula and islands. A visitor to the Aegean islands
recognizes congruence between the indigenous style of dry stone architec-
ture in picturesque harbour towns and the nucleated pattern of stone
paved streets in ancient civic communities. It is rather more difficult to
see what the relationship is between modern towns in the Balkan interior
and their ancient predecessors. What would such towns have been like?
Recent research suggests that although the ecology of the north favoured a
rather different set of social configurations from those of central and
southern Greece, the observable differences may have been much less
marked than the terminology ofpoleisand other forms of community
organization imply. Until quite recently many scholars assumed that
classical city-states were absent from the north, except for a limited
number of‘colonial’foundations strung out around the coast from lower
Macedonia to the Black Sea.^27 After all, when geographers of thefifth and
fourth centuriesbcdescribed these regions, they referred most frequently
topoleisin the coastal areas and had little to say about what was happening
farther inland—or so it appears atfirst glance.
(^27) Compare the description of cities in Macedonia by Papazoglou 1988, 37 and n.1 and
Hammond inHM II,61–5 on the one hand, with Hatzopoulos 1996, I, 49–123, esp. 105–23;
Hatzopoulos and Paschidis 2004 on the other.
Introduction 17