Metals and Colonisation in the Northern Aegean

Given in Greek, this lecture by Giorgos Sanidas of the University of Lille examines the extraction and working of metals in the northern Aegean and their connection to Greek colonisation between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. Sanidas begins with the polymetallic ore deposits of the southern Rhodope zone, Mount Pangaeus, Thasos and the Serbo-Macedonian massif in eastern Chalkidiki, where gold, silver, copper and iron were exploited from the Late Neolithic onwards and recorded in Homer, Archilochus and Herodotus.

Tracing the adoption of iron from the end of the Late Bronze Age, Sanidas stresses the need to classify metallurgical waste before laboratory sampling. In the Thermaic Gulf, he notes gold and bronze casting at Methone and presents a 7th-century BC deposit at Karabournaki (ancient Therme) containing forging slags, hammerscale and a cooking pot used for quenching iron.

On Thasos, iron production alongside copper is documented by the 10th and 9th centuries BC at Kastri and in pre-colonial levels beneath the later Artemision and Acropolis. After Parian colonists founded the city shortly before 670 BC, the Acropolis mine lay inside the urban perimeter, and excavations near the Archaic agora, the Artemision and the pre-550 BC fortification wall yielded over 100 kilograms of smelting and forging slags. At Stageira in Chalkidiki, spatial mapping of more than 150 kilograms of slag and litharge from pre-500 BC contexts indicates smelting furnaces in the saddle between the two hills, primary smithing on the south hill, and cupellation of local silver. Sanidas concludes by connecting northern Aegean silver to weighed bullion and early coinage, and iron production to the arming of citizen hoplites.