should include more specifically archaeological information about
known habitation sites whose ancient name is unknown. TheInventory
was intended to give priority to named Greek settlements, and the
unwary reader has no means of knowing whether there are sites, albeit
excluded from these lists, that could be relevant to a regional evaluation
of the more peripheral areas. The progressive discovery of ever more new
sites in Macedonia and Thrace, since thefirst forays of pioneering
investigators in the middle of the nineteenth century, suggests that we
should at least try tofind out how many of them were significant
population nuclei, and whether there are patterns of settlement in the
north that indicate different approaches to land use from those familiar
from more southerly parts of the Greek mainland.
Nicholas Hammond apart, historians have been reluctant to include
archaeological evidence in their enquiries into the origins of the Mace-
donian kingdom. Thrace, on the other hand, has been studied by histor-
ians primarily as a Roman province, whose‘prehistoric’background has
not been thought to have much relevance for students of classical
antiquity.^26 In contrast to narrative accounts, material evidence offers
an expanding source of new information that can be exploited in a
variety of ways, particularly when we can cross-refer evidence on the
ground to inscriptions as well as other types of written data. It therefore
makes sense to begin with the material culture that tells us something
substantive about the people, the herdsmen with golden leaves of this
chapter’s title, as well as places.
SETTLEMENTS, CITIES AND SANCTUARIES
Understanding settlement forms—poleisand related conceptsThe modern history of the east Balkan region, as was explained in
Chapter 1, has deeply affected the kinds of investigations that have
been carried out at ancient settlement sites. Until the time of Androni-
kos’s discoveries at Vergina in the late 1970s,fieldwork in Macedonia
that was targeted to reveal evidence for thefirst millenniumbc(rather
than earlier periods) was limited to a small number of predominantly
(^26) Ian Haynes’s introduction to a new study of early Roman Thrace contains a map
reproducing the principal military locations between the north Aegean and the Danube (fig.
1.1), whilst his text refers to Philippopolis, Seuthopolis, and Bizye (Haynes 2011, 6, 9–10);
cf. Hawthorne, Varbanov, and Dragoev in the same volume; see further Chs 3 and 4.
Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces 55