Recent rural economies in the mountainous area of Western and Central Zagori (Epirus-NW Greece) range from nomadic specialised pastoralism to sedentary agro-pastoralism. Recent large scale pastoralism in Greece depended on several conditions which arguably did not exist until historical times: a market for the exchange of pastoral and arable produce, summer pasture created by upland clearance and consolidated blocks of winter pasture on the fallow land of lowland estates. On the other hand, the existence of an urban market and extensive upland and lowland pastures are less critical to the sedentary agro-pastoral economy. The purpose of this study is to caution against the uncritical use of traditional practices as analogies for antiquity, to suggest that the greatest value of studying traditional rural economies may be as a guide to the questions we should be asking about the past, and to propose a new way with which to approach ethno-archaeological contexts.