the advantage of enabling us to look at the economic interconnections
between neighbouring communities, since they were the most likely to
exchange staples and raw materials, to use the same market facilities, to
need each other’s expertise and resources to construct public and private
monuments, to transport commodities by land, and to cooperate in
military conflicts.
If we want to construct an economic narrative, the agents we consider
must include not just the various parties that feature in political dia-
logues, including the ruling dynasties of Macedon and Thrace; the
coastal harbour towns of the north Aegean, the major islands (Thasos
and Samothrace), and the topographical bottleneck of the Bosporus; but
also the various communities of the continental interior.
Agents of changeThe primary agents of economic change in the north were the indigen-
ous inhabitants of the region. Previous studies of the northern Aegean in
the Classical period have begun with historically-attested newcomers—
the invading Persian armies at the turn of thefifth centurybc, or the
various Greek-speaking traders and settlers who had set up temporary
staging posts along the north Aegean coastline between the seventh and
fourth centuriesbc. Here we have a major problem of information.
Evidence of incoming traffic, often in the form of inorganic materials
such as ceramics, has proved easier to identify and classify than more
nuanced background information about local communities. Yet
imports do not appear in a vacuum, since they represent one half
of an exchange relationship and must be explained in terms of those
who used them. Historical interactions may be better documented in
treaties and written agreements, whether at regional or local level, but
their existence can only be explained by becoming better acquainted
with indigenous societies and with long-term changes in regional
ecologies.
However, atfirst glance those indigenous peoples seem hardly visible.
Such written evidence as survives is highly fragmentary. Only a tiny
proportion of the written sources are of local origin. Even when we
consider topographic information, which is the most accessible kind of
data available to contemporary research, it is far from easy to interpret.
We should begin with a defining example, namely the ancient city of
Aigeai, south-east of the modern town of Vergina, which encapsulates
many of the historical conundra that have made the study of northern
settlement history, in Macedonia as well as Thrace and the Bosporus,
52 Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces