Settlement Organisation In The Ohrid Region

Abstract

The settlement area of the Ohrid region extends on the shores of a homonymous lake shared between the Republics of Northern Macedonia and Albania. Despite its mountainous framing, the geographical setting of the Ohrid region provides the broadest accessible link between the Aegean and the Adriatic regions in the southern Balkans and was, vice versa, an eminent pre -condition for the formation of supra -regional networks in the past. Placed on this communication route, which is embodied by the widely known Via Egnatia, the region represented an important hub in the cultural connectivity between the Aegean, the Adriatic see, and the Balkans. As a response to the lacking of systematic investigations, this paper presents a reconstruction of the pre- and protohistoric habitation in the region. Reviewing past archaeological discoveries and recent data collected during the first two field seasons conducted within the frame of the project Frontier Studies, this paper focuses on the settlement organisation and traces its development as well as corresponding phenomena, such as connectivity and response to environmental changes, diachronically from the Neolithic down to Late Antiquity.

Keywords

• macedonia
• lake ohrid
• habitation
• bronze age
• iron ages
• archaic period
• hellenistic period
• roman period