Lychnidos between the Dassaretae, Macedonians and Celts. Settlement patterns in the Ohrid region during the Classical and Hellenistic periods
Abstract
The city of Ohrid - in ancient times known as Lychnidos - lies on the shore of a homonymous lake and is visually one of the most favourable sites located within its basin. The dynamic, biologically diverse and resource-rich landscape made this region a preferred place for habitation since the Early Neolithic.
Furthermore, despite its mountainous framing, the region around lake Ohrid provides the broadest accessible link between the Aegean and the Adriatic regions in the south Balkans - widely known as "Candavian road" or, from the Roman period onwards, Via Egnatia. Placed on these communication routes, the habitation within the Ohrid region was gradually transformed during the 1st millennium BC.
Pile-dwelling settlements in the wetlands of the lake as well as hill-top sites characterised the settlement pattern during the bulk of prehistory, only to be abandoned at the end of the Early and Developed Iron Ages. Based on the information provided by a recent dataset, it seems that merely a few of the latter was being resettled at a much larger scale after the middle of the 1st millennium BC.
These late Classical and early Hellenistic fortified settlements such as St. Erazmo are very different in both shape and character to the small hill-tops of the earlier periods.
Furthermore, they indicate an existence of a central and complex regional defence system within this region, and - complemented by epigraphic, literary and numismatic evidence - suggest that the centralisation of the economic, social, and political way of life occurred in the 4th/3 century BC. Therefore, it is the aim of this paper to reconstruct these processes during the rather turbulent historical periods of the 5th-2th century BC, in the years between the rule of the Dassaretae, Macedonians and Celts.