Abstract
The city of Ohrid lies on the northern shore of a homonymous lake within the orogenic belt of Dinarides-Albanides. The basin of Lake Ohrid is framed by the Galichica Mountain Range (max. 2,250 masl) to the east and the Mokra Mountain Range (max. 2,200 masl) to the west.
Despite the mountainous framing, this basin and range setting provides the broadest accessible link between the Aegean and the Adriatic regions in the southern Balkans - and was, vice versa, an eminent condition for the formation of the supraregional connection widely known as the "Candavian Road" or, from the Roman period onwards, Via Egnatia. Placed on this communication route, the region around Ohrid represented an important hub in the cultural connectivity between the southern Aegean cultural koine and the Balkans in the north.
Even though the exact timing of this line of communication opening remains obscure, the interdependences between the regional habitation and the road(s) have appeared to be intelligible: an explicit local development has been postulated for the Bronze / Early Iron Age in contrary to a global connectivity of the Developed Iron Ages. However, several methodological concerns raise with regard to the differing nature of the given archaeological material from Bronze Age settlements and the necropolises of the Iron Ages.
The actual project Frontier Studies tries, hence, to emphasize a diachronic, archaeological and palaeoenvironmental study in the region to get a richer insight into the settlement/cultural dynamics and the establishment of supraregional connectivity in the region in the face of its mountainous landscape; for the latest offers the possibility to test different theoretical approaches in order to explain the development of the socio-cultural customs in a "closed" region diachronically.