trading site with its own harbour installations during the sixth century
bc.^30 This could have been Therme, one of the more prominent com-
munities located around the gulf named after it. It was, according to the
excavators, a mixed community of Greeks and indigenous‘Thracians’,as
well as traders, whose presence had a greater or lesser degree of perman-
ency. The strong Ionianflavour of local ceramics, which are noticeably
affected in form and design by imports, may well reflect the visits of
Ionian tradesmen from north Aegean centres, particularly those supply-
ing the numerous communities of the Chalkidic peninsula, from Thasos,
and other north Aegean supply routes, although the same items could
have travelled with various carriers. It is not easy to identify the range of
merchants operating in these waters.^31
Karabournaki is one, albeit perhaps among the most significant, in a
string of coastal sites in the vicinity of the Thermaic Gulf and along the
north Aegean coastline that witnessed an expansion of population into
the continental interior during thefirst half of thefirst millenniumbc.
This pattern of population dynamics, which is connected to an expan-
sion of pastoral resources and their seasonal accommodation within a
wider landscape, does not correspond to the prevailing preoccupation
among many, perhaps the majority of ancient historians, with settlement
nucleation in the same period. The‘rise of thepolis’remains one of the
dominant templates used by contemporary scholars to examine this long
historical phase. Nevertheless, for people in classical antiquity, abstract
appreciation of thepolisidea seems to have developed at a far faster rate
than the physical concomitants, including public spaces and amenities,
which we associate with the concept.‘The conclusion must be that an
urban mentality and, indeed, ideology existed long before the typical
Greek city had been conceptualized in a spatial sense.’^32
Thepolisas an idea of community evidently existed for some time
before it began to acquire physical dimensions that can be recognized
two and a half thousand years later. A decade of intense research at
the Copenhagen Polis Centre produced a wide range of thoughtful
papers about the use of the term and its applications in time and space
between the eighth centurybcand the reign of Alexander the Great. The
(^30) Tiverios et al. 2006; Tiverios 2009a; Tsiafakis 2010; Manakidou 2010.
(^31) Flensted-Jensen 2004, 818–19, no. 552; Manakidou 2010; see further Ch. 5.
(^32) Crielaard 2009, 369; cf.Inventory, 1376–1381, for lists of‘Political Architecture’and
other built public amenities, where with few exceptions only temples predate thefifth
centurybc; Baralis 2010, 247–52 for settlement expansion in thefirst half of thefirst
millenniumbc.
Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces 57