Neolithic settlers in the Aegean Thrace

Recent archaeological investigations in northern Greece testify to the presence of first farmers in the area of central
and western Macedonia as early as the middle of the 7th millennium BCE. Scant evidence from Makri near
Alexandroupolis points to somewhat later appearance of farmers in Aegean Thrace dating to the 2nd half of the
7th millennium BCE. The number of settlements in the Aegean Thrace identified so far amounts to 27. All of them
are located in the plain enclosed by the range of Rhodope mountains to the north and by the sea to the south.
Most of them are known only from surface findings. The exception to this are five sites of which only the settlement
at Makri was systematically excavated. According to the available archaeological data most of the neolithic
settlements appear to have been established in the middle of the 6th millennium BCE, almost 1000 years after the
appearance of first farmers in the region. The lack of data for the earlier phases of the Neolithic is due to the limited
archaeological research of the Neolithic period, combined with the complex paleoenvironmental history of the
region which have affected the visibility of the archaeological finds. Due to the raise of the sea level during the
Holocene a large zone of the plain in the coastal area have been covered by water, while rivers and numerous
streams of the Rhodope mountains range have formed alluvial deposits in the lowlands, contributing substantially
to the constant environmental changes and the formation of lagoons, lakes and marshes. An ongoing
interdisciplinary research that combines archaeological, geological and geophysical methods, along with
radiocarbon dating of the samples from drilling cores provides new evidence for habitation in the earlier phases of
the Neolithic in Aegean Thrace and rich data for the settlement pattern in the later Neolithic.