Discovery of Ancient Olive Farming in Sicily Challenges Previous Beliefs

Summary

Three thou­sand seven hun­dred years ago, olive farm­ing was already tak­ing place in Sicily, 1,000 years ear­lier than pre­vi­ously thought, as revealed by pollen analy­sis in the Pantano Grande area. The research sug­gests that knowl­edge of olive cul­ti­va­tion may have been brought to Sicily from the Levant through trade and cul­tural exchange, lead­ing to the devel­op­ment of agro­nomic prac­tices in the region dur­ing the Bronze Age.

Three thou­sand seven hun­dred years ago, ancient forms of olive farm­ing were already tak­ing place in Sicily, almost 1,000 years ear­lier than pre­vi­ously believed.

The rev­e­la­tion comes from ana­lyz­ing pollen released by local veg­e­ta­tion over mil­lions of years. By exam­in­ing pollen-rich sed­i­ment lay­ers, researchers were able to iden­tify olive pollen among many other types.

That also allowed them to deter­mine the point in time when olive pollen became pre­dom­i­nant, show­ing clear signs of olive farm­ing.

The research inves­ti­gated the con­tents of sed­i­ments in the Pantano Grande area, near Lake Ganzirri — a step away from the mytho­log­i­cal tur­bu­lent streams of Charybdis and Scylla’s rocky caves in the Strait of Messina.

“It’s a very inter­est­ing area, as going through the strait allowed gen­er­a­tions of sea­far­ers com­ing from the West, the East and North Africa to access the Tyrrhenian Italian penin­sula,” Jordan Palli, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Tuscia’s eco­log­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal sci­ences depart­ment, told Olive Oil Times.

Adding to that, researchers looked for evi­dence in that area since it is espe­cially rich in bio­di­ver­sity and also home to sig­nif­i­cant his­tor­i­cal events.

“As it hap­pens in all large water masses, all that is inter­cepted because of grav­ity pre­cip­i­tates and might become sed­i­ment,” Palli said. ​“Among these, there is pollen, which is a micro­scopic ele­ment pro­duced in huge quan­ti­ties by plants.” 

The sed­i­ment col­umn slowly and pro­gres­sively accu­mu­lates mate­r­ial, pro­duc­ing unin­ter­rupted strat­i­fi­ca­tion.

“Even more inter­est­ingly, it main­tains a chrono­log­i­cal sequence, as the lower lay­ers are the most ancient. It becomes a nat­ural archive,” Palli said.

Those sed­i­ments are rich in mate­ri­als of many diverse ori­gins, such as leaves, wood, fruits, fungi, or sin­gle-cell algae.

In Pantano Grande, wild olives were present, mixed with a wide range of Mediterranean veg­e­ta­tion.

“They have been there for a long time, until the human pres­ence began reshap­ing most of the coastal areas,” Palli said.

To cor­rectly dis­tin­guish wild olive pollen from pollen from olive trees in a human-dri­ven envi­ron­ment, researchers devel­oped two indices.

The first one focused on olive trees grow­ing with the typ­i­cal Mediterranean sea­side veg­e­ta­tion. The sec­ond one con­sid­ered olives shar­ing forested areas with oaks, such as holm oaks.

The two indices allowed researchers to deter­mine veg­e­ta­tion trends in both set­tings.

“When the olive pollen pre­dom­i­nance emerged in both indices, that was evi­dence of a sig­nif­i­cantly broader pres­ence of the plant when com­pared to all other plants that should have co-existed there,” Palli said.

“This allowed us to inter­pret such data as the sig­nal of arti­fi­cial prop­a­ga­tion of the plant, as its ecol­ogy would not have allowed it to have such pre­dom­i­nance,” he added. ​“That told us that local pop­u­la­tions had taken action.”

Such analy­sis led the researchers to iden­tify three his­tor­i­cal peri­ods in which olive farm­ing took place in the area.

While the sec­ond (dur­ing the Roman Empire) and the third (mod­ern times) are well known and doc­u­mented, the first iden­ti­fied period came as a sur­prise.

It stretches from the Middle Bronze Age, in the 18^th cen­tury BCE, to the 12^th cen­tury BCE.

Most his­to­ri­ans have long agreed that knowl­edge about olive tree farm­ing orig­i­nated from the Aegean area, prob­a­bly brought by Greek colonists to south­ern Italy around the 8^th cen­tury BCE.

“We do not know much about the Sicans,” Palli said. ​“Their set­tle­ments are below mod­ern cities, such as Messina. Some inves­ti­ga­tions showed that there is much to explore down there, but that can­not hap­pen because of what is above it.”

Three thou­sand years ago, olive grow­ing was already tak­ing place in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The new research evi­dence shows that knowl­edge about the olive was prob­a­bly car­ried to the Sicilian coasts by mer­chants com­ing from the Levant.

“There are archae­o­log­i­cal remains of pot­tery and other objects orig­i­nat­ing from the Aegean area,” Palli said.

“Thanks to the archae­ol­o­gists and other researchers who joined our research, we have been able to for­mu­late a sce­nario of what has prob­a­bly hap­pened at that time in Pantano Grande,” he added.

In that sce­nario, trade brought new knowl­edge through cul­tural exchange.

“Wild olives were already present in that area, and the local pop­u­la­tion began appre­ci­at­ing the nat­ural resource,” Palli noted.

In the Levant, where more advanced civ­i­liza­tions thrived, olive oil and the olive tree were already highly sig­nif­i­cant.

Coming to Sicily from the Levant, mer­chants and sea­far­ers might have noticed the many olive trees. Sharing knowl­edge ensued.

“We could say that agro­nomic know-how devel­oped there, but we should always bear in mind that we are talk­ing of ancient times, so we should not com­pare that knowl­edge to mod­ern agro­nom­ics in any way,” Palli said.

“Let’s keep in mind that at the time, tools didn’t exist yet, they weren’t wide­spread,” he added. ​“There was no plow, none of the equip­ment we think of today. The pos­si­bil­ity of cul­ti­vat­ing and break­ing the soil in a spe­cific way sim­ply wasn’t there.” 

“When we talk about that very early phase of the Bronze Age, yes, we’re talk­ing about cul­ti­va­tion, but not cul­ti­va­tion as we know it today,” Palli con­tin­ued.

At that time, farm­ers could cul­ti­vate the olives in areas where they were already present.

“What they might have done was to look for areas where the tree was present or else favored the olive trees over the other plants in spe­cific areas,” Palli said.

A cru­cial part of the research was the pale­o­cli­mate analy­sis, which allowed sci­en­tists to study cli­mate vari­a­tions over time.

“Times of expan­sion or regres­sion of spe­cific veg­e­ta­tion might depend on vari­a­tions hap­pen­ing, for instance, on the rel­a­tive humid­ity lev­els or the amounts of rain­fall. Those vari­a­tions might allow a species to bet­ter com­pete with the oth­ers,” Palli said.

By com­par­ing the evi­dence of paleo-cli­matic vari­a­tions as ana­lyzed in pre­vi­ous research, there was no spe­cific cor­re­la­tion with olive pre­dom­i­nance.

“That showed us that the increas­ing vol­umes of olive pollen were not due to a spe­cific cli­matic phase. That sup­ported the hypoth­e­sis of the human inter­ven­tion,” Palli said.

The ancient approach to olive farm­ing in the Pantano Grande area lasted for five to six cen­turies.

“It col­lapsed in the 12^th cen­tury BCE,” Palli said. ​“That does not mean that the knowl­edge col­lapsed as well, as pop­u­la­tions could have moved to other areas.” 

What researchers know is that around the 12^th cen­tury, sev­eral sig­nif­i­cant events hap­pened.

“The first impact came from the Ausoni pop­u­la­tion descend­ing to Sicily from what is today cen­tral Italy. Archaeological remains show sig­nif­i­cant move­ments of peo­ple at the time,” Palli said.

That might have induced the Sicans to leave the area. According to researchers, ran­dom pirate-like activ­ity began to occur along the Sicilian coasts at the time, likely car­ried out by pop­u­la­tions who, over time, came to be iden­ti­fied as Saracens.

“Such activ­i­ties could have eas­ily impacted sea trade and even pushed pop­u­la­tions away from the coasts,” Palli said.

Additionally, it is believed that Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active vol­ca­noes, located 100 kilo­me­ters from Messina, had an enor­mous erup­tion at that time. Traces of this erup­tion were later found in Albania, approx­i­mately 600 kilo­me­ters away.

“Ancient Roman authors described it as an unpar­al­leled deep upheaval, a gen­er­a­tional event. It is called the Sican Event, as it is believed that it might have pushed Sicans from east­ern Sicily to the west­ern part of the island,” Palli said.

Thanks to pollen analy­sis, researchers ver­i­fied that after that period, the pre­dom­i­nance of olive pollen ceased, with sed­i­ment lay­ers show­ing a return to a more typ­i­cal con­di­tion of mixed plant species.

According to Palli, three years of analy­sis and two more years to write the research were needed to bring together the work of archae­ol­o­gists, cli­ma­tol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, ecol­o­gists and pale­oe­col­o­gists.

“Without such col­lec­tive work, we would not have been able to com­bine his­tory, pollen, archae­ol­ogy, sed­i­ment analy­sis, and paleo-cli­mate and pro­duce such evi­dence,” Palli con­cluded.