There was no Macedonian archeology before the creation of the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The territories of “geographical Macedonia” attracted some archeological interest in the second half of the 19th century; a number of renowned Western archeologists like the French Paul Perdrizet and Léon Heuzey conducted excavations there. In the early 1860s, Heuzey studied the site of Vergina where, more than a century later, the Greek archeologist Manolis Andronikos discovered the presumed tomb of Philip II.

Since the First World War, specialists from Sofia and Belgrade have worked on the territory of what is today the Republic of Macedonia. In 1918, the Trebeništa necropolis was excavated by Bulgarian archeologists and, in 1924, their Serbian colleagues started investigating the important Paeonian and Roman site of Stobi. One of the first Bulgarian archeologists, Georgi Balasčev (1869–1936), was born in Macedonia (Ohrid). He worked mostly on the medieval Bulgarian state.

Nevertheless, even the earliest articulations of a Macedonian national ideology drew inspiration from antiquity – in particular, from the glory of the ancient Macedonians. There were persons from the region who considered Philip II and Alexander the Great to be Bulgarians: this was the case with the teacher Dimitar Makedonski (1848–1898) from Embore/Emborio. But even in 1871 the Bulgarian Petko Slavejkov showed himself aware of Macedonian nationalists claiming they were “not Bulgarians but Macedonians, descendants of ancient Macedonians”. His observation is borne out by men like the self-taught historian and lexicographer Ǵorǵija Pulevski (1817–1893), author of the poem A Macedonian fairy (1878) and of the large manuscript Slavic-Macedonian general history (1892). In these early versions of Macedonian nationalism, the ancient Macedonians were seen as Slavs and different from the Bulgarians.

Later, Dimitrija Čupovski (1878–1940), leader of the Macedonian Scientific and Literary Society in St Petersburg (1902-17), devised a flag with the image of Bucephalus, the horse of Alexander the Great. Even so, his circle of Macedonian national activists demonstrated little interest in ancient Macedonia and was inspired mostly by the Slavic medieval period.