Early farmers in Aegean Thrace

Recent archaeological investigations in Western and Central Macedonia testify to the presence of first farmers in the area of North Greece as early as the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, or perhaps somewhat earlier. In comparison to this region, first farmers in Aegean Thrace appear to have settled somewhat later. According to single radiocarbon dating from the Makri settlement, their presence is confirmed in the late 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, several centuries after the appearance of first farmers in the area. It is possible that the lack of data for the earlier phases of the Neolithic in Aegean Thrace 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 project 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 phases.