It is connected with the mainland by regular ferry lines between Keramoti and Thasos town, and between the regional centre of Kavala and Skala Prinou.

In contrast, Early Bronze Age remains on the island align it with the Aegean culture of the Cyclades and Sporades, to the south; at Skala Sotiros[5] for example, a small settlement was encircled by a strongly built defensive wall.

Even earlier activity is demonstrated by the presence of large pieces of 'megalithic' anthropomorphic stelai built into these walls, which, so far, have no parallels in the Aegean area.

There is then a gap in the archaeological record until the end of the Bronze Age c 1100 BC, when the first burials took place at the large cemetery of Kastri in the interior of the island.

[11] A generation or so later, the poet Archilochus, a descendant of these colonists, wrote of casting away his shield during a minor war against an indigenous Thracian tribe, the Saians.

In response, the Thasians built warships and strengthened their fortifications, but this provoked the suspicions of Darius I of Persia, who compelled them to surrender their ships and pull down their walls.

[10] After the Battle of Aegospotami (405 BC), Thasos again fell into the hands of the Lacedaemonians under Lysander but the Athenians must have recovered it, for it formed one of the subjects of dispute between them and Philip II of Macedonia.

[10] Excavations of various island sites between March and May 1887 by Theodore and Mabel Bent uncovered an 'Arch of Caracalla', and the collapsed remains of a unique portrait-statue of the emperor Hadrian's wife, the empress Flavia Vibia Sabina, with an inscription dedicated to her as a "high priestess".

[17] It is related that the Byzantine Greek Saint Joannicius the Great (752–846) in one of his miracles freed the island of Thasos from a multitude of snakes.

[19] Nearly 50 years later, a revolt against Ottoman rule arose in 1821, at the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, led by Hatzigiorgis Metaxas, but it failed.

This register excluded women, orphans, Christians below the age of puberty, the mentally or physically incapacitated as well as high-ranking officials, so the actual population would have been over double this.

[20] The island had been given in 1813 by the Sultan Mahmud II to the Ottoman Albanian ruler Muhammad Ali of Egypt as a personal fiefdom, as a reward for his intervention against the Wahhabites.

[21] On 20 October 1912 during the First Balkan War, the Greek navy invaded Thasos and annexed it into Greece after more than 350 years of Ottoman Turkish rule.

During the Axis occupation (April 1941 – October 1944) Thasos, along with the region of East Macedonia and Thrace, was assigned by the Nazis to their Bulgarian allies.

Thasos' mountainous terrain facilitated resistance activity, mainly led by the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM).

Historically, the island's population was chiefly engaged in agriculture and stockbreeding, and established villages inland, some of them connected via stairways (known as skalas) to harbors at the shore.

The local population gradually migrated towards these shoreline settlements as tourism began to develop as an important source of income.

At least three periods of regional deformation have been identified, the most important being large scale isoclinal folding with axes aligned north-west.

The basin is filled with Late Miocene-Pliocene sediments, including ubiquitously repeated evaporite layers of rock salt and anhydrite-dolomite that alternate with sandstones, conglomerates, black shales, and uraniferous coal measures (Proedrou, 1979, 1988; Taupitz, 1985).

Stratigraphically equivalent rocks on the mainland are clastic sediments with coal beds, marine to brackish fluvial units and travertines.

These later mines were both open-cast and underground, mostly to exploit the island's numerous karst hosted calamine deposits for their lead and silver.