New Science Rewrites the Origins of Olive Cultivation in Italy

Summary

New tech­nolo­gies and sci­en­tific meth­ods are help­ing archae­ol­o­gists bet­ter under­stand the mil­len­nia-old his­tory of olive oil and olive cul­ti­va­tion in Italy, with Emlyn Dodd sug­gest­ing that olive oil is a use­ful lens to explore daily life in pre-Roman times. Evidence sug­gests that olive trees grew wild in Italy long before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and the inte­gra­tion of mod­ern sci­en­tific approaches is help­ing to untan­gle the tra­jec­to­ries of olive cul­ti­va­tion and pro­duc­tion in the region.

New tech­nolo­gies and sci­en­tific meth­ods are help­ing archae­ol­o­gists bet­ter under­stand the mil­len­nia-old his­tory of olive oil and olive cul­ti­va­tion in Italy.

According to Emlyn Dodd, a senior lec­turer at the University of London’s Institute of Classical Studies, olive oil is a use­ful lens through which to view how peo­ple lived their daily lives in pre-Roman times.

“Olive oil and wine under­pin life in the ancient Mediterranean,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“They are a cru­cial win­dow through which we can start to explore daily life, econ­omy, trade, reli­gion, and med­i­cine. Looking at olive oil is a really use­ful way for us to under­stand what these ancient cul­tures and soci­eties were like.”

In a recent research arti­cle, Dodd wrote that evi­dence unearthed using newer pale­o­ge­netic and archaeob­otan­i­cal tech­niques could com­pli­cate pre­vail­ing the­o­ries of the lin­ear spread of olive cul­ti­va­tion from the Levant to Italy. The find­ings also illu­mi­nate how peo­ple inter­acted with wild olives before manip­u­lat­ing and domes­ti­cat­ing them.

The pre­vail­ing par­a­digm holds that the Phoenicians intro­duced the olive tree to Crete about 3,500 years ago and later to main­land Greece. In turn, Greek col­o­niz­ers intro­duced olives to south­ern and cen­tral Italy about 2,700 years ago, but olive cul­ti­va­tion and olive oil pro­duc­tion remained mar­ginal on the penin­sula through the Roman period and into the Middle Ages.

“There’s tra­di­tion­ally been a con­sen­sus that [dur­ing the Roman period] places like North Africa and Spain were the big olive oil pro­duc­ers and that Italy was a minor player,” Dodd said. ​“That’s led a lot of researchers to focus on those regions rather than Italy, and played a role in peo­ple pay­ing less atten­tion to the pre-his­tory of Italy too.”

“It’s not until we’ve had these more advanced sci­en­tific tech­niques com­ing into play that it has helped peo­ple start to look at Italy in a slightly dif­fer­ent man­ner,” he added. ​“We can use dif­fer­ent tech­niques to parse out bits of infor­ma­tion that help to recen­ter Italy in this story of the pre­his­tory of olive oil, and bal­ance a lit­tle bit with these other regions that have been stud­ied more intently over the last 50 years.”

Dodd pointed to paly­no­log­i­cal evi­dence — the study of pollen and non-pollen paly­nomorphs such as spores and cer­tain micro­scopic organ­isms — sug­gest­ing that Italy lay within the nat­ural range of wild olive through­out the Pleistocene. He said pock­ets of wild olive may have sur­vived in parts of the penin­sula and islands dur­ing the Last Glacial Maximum, which ended 11,700 years ago.

Olive pollen dat­ing back 10,000 to 10,500 years ago was found in marine cores taken 20 kilo­me­ters east of the Apulian coast. Separately, olive pollen from 7,700 to 8,700 years ago was uncov­ered in Lago di Pergusa and Gorgo Bassom, both on Sicily.

Dodd wrote that this evi­dence sug­gests olive trees grew wild in Italy long before the Phoenicians arrived in Crete.

However, the first evi­dence of human inter­ac­tion with wild olives appears later in the form of char­coal, indi­cat­ing that even before peo­ple were eat­ing or manip­u­lat­ing olive trees, they were burn­ing the wood.

Olive char­coal sam­ples found in Sicily and Puglia date back 8,100 to 8,600 years ago. In Liguria, olive char­coal from 7,590 to 7,740 years ago was found in the Arene Candide cave, sug­gest­ing low-inten­sity wood­land exploita­tion.

Rudimentary tools were also found around the site, sug­gest­ing that peo­ple may have favored the growth of olive trees in the area for fuel, col­lected wild fruit for food, or pruned branches for fod­der.

Still, the lack of olive char­coal, pits and pollen at inland human set­tle­ments — away from the coastal and lower hill­slopes in Puglia — sug­gests peo­ple were har­vest­ing wild olives rather than cul­ti­vat­ing them at that point.

Evidence of inten­tional cul­ti­va­tion and later domes­ti­ca­tion comes from a grow­ing body of archaeob­otan­i­cal data, espe­cially pollen cores. Dodd said these records indi­cate peo­ple began delib­er­ately cul­ti­vat­ing olive trees cen­turies before the arrival of the first Greek col­o­niz­ers.

“The key evi­dence for this tran­si­tion from exploit­ing wild olive trees to delib­er­ate cul­ti­va­tion lead­ing to domes­ti­ca­tion is the sharp jumps in the pollen graphs,” Dodd said. ​“In some par­tic­u­lar regions of Italy, there are very sharp shifts in pollen sam­ples from low lev­els where they’re prob­a­bly exploit­ing wild olives to much more sig­nif­i­cant and higher amounts of pollen being found, which are sug­ges­tive of delib­er­ate cul­ti­va­tion, exploita­tion, and con­trol of olives.”

He added that the pat­tern stands out when com­pared with pollen graphs for other tree species, which remain rel­a­tively steady over the same period. The con­trast sug­gests a human role in expand­ing olive grow­ing and hints at the ear­li­est oil pro­duc­tion.

One of the clear­est exam­ples comes from Pantano Grande in Sicily, where pollen sam­ples indi­cated that olive cul­ti­va­tion was tak­ing place 3,700 years ago — 1,000 years ear­lier than pre­vi­ously believed.

Based on this evi­dence, Dodd said it is not hard to imag­ine small-scale olive oil pro­duc­tion using tools that were not well pre­served in the archae­o­log­i­cal record.

“Of course, there were rudi­men­tary tech­niques of pro­duc­ing mod­est amounts of oil, enough for house­hold use, which leave no trace in the arche­o­log­i­cal record,” Dodd said, such as wooden mor­tars and pes­tles or grind­ing olives into paste in leather or cloth sacks with stones.

“It’s not until slightly later peri­ods that we start to get more con­vinc­ing evi­dence for oil pro­duc­tion,” he added. ​“But just because we don’t have good arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence for oil pro­duc­tion, like a press that we would get in slightly later peri­ods, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a smok­ing gun argu­ment to say that they weren’t pro­duc­ing oil.”

In the paper, Dodd iden­ti­fied struc­tures on Corsica, just north of Sardinia, dat­ing back between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago that ​“may have been used to squeeze olives into sacks fixed to pegs, per­haps to extract oil.”

He acknowl­edged that more ​“con­crete evi­dence” of local pro­duc­tion appears later, includ­ing olive waste in Campania dat­ing back 3,400 to 3,800 years ago. Dodd also cited pos­i­tive organic residue analy­sis and other evi­dence point­ing to the ​“pres­ence of olive oil in mul­ti­ple large, locally pro­duced pithoi,” large stor­age con­tain­ers in Puglia and Calabria from around 3,000 to 3,200 years ago.

“We’ve got good evi­dence now of local inno­va­tions hap­pen­ing, that these indige­nous pop­u­la­tions are exper­i­ment­ing and try­ing things out, and then per­haps when they’re in con­tact with these other pop­u­la­tions, that’s ener­giz­ing, and that’s cre­at­ing new kinds of ideas and new impe­tus,” Dodd said.

“The same thing can be said for the early Iron Age (circa 3,000 years ago), where we have the Phoenicians and Greeks com­ing to Italy and mak­ing con­tact and set­ting up colonies,” he added. ​“We know now that there’s already olive cul­ti­va­tion going on, that there’s prob­a­bly olive oil pro­duc­tion, even if at a small-scale.”

“By the time we get the Phoenicians and the Greeks com­ing across, that’s just ener­giz­ing and cre­at­ing new forms and new ideas about how to do these sorts of things, which then laid the foun­da­tion for the Roman era,” he said.

While there is no direct archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence, Dodd said it is pos­si­ble that olive tree cut­tings were being trans­ported, based on dis­cov­er­ies of grapevine cut­tings found in the hulls of sunken ships from the era.

Even with the expand­ing toolkit of olive oil research, Dodd wrote that the ​“lack of evi­dence for oil pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties might mean Bronze Age ole­i­cul­ture was short-lived, ended or severely dimin­ished by rup­tures with the Aegean world.”

“However, data increas­ingly sug­gests that oil pro­duc­tion prob­a­bly occurred on a fluc­tu­at­ing and region­ally vari­able basis, using tools and tech­niques that often present ephemeral archae­o­log­i­cal traces,” he added.

Overall, paly­no­log­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests that as olive cul­ti­va­tion increased in some parts of Italy, it stag­nated in oth­ers. Dodd wrote that olive cul­ti­va­tion did not begin to flour­ish across the penin­sula and islands until about 2,600 years ago, with the Etruscans play­ing a cen­tral role in the sys­tem­atic estab­lish­ment of olive groves and the use of olives.

Dodd said ana­lyz­ing the archae­o­log­i­cal record through the lens of olive oil helps reveal the nuances of rela­tion­ships among ancient Mediterranean peo­ples, and new meth­ods offer a clearer view of daily life in pre-Roman Italy.

“Rather than pur­su­ing the his­tory of olive oil in Italy through a colo­nial­ist or impe­r­ial lens, we should seek to com­pre­hend how inter­ac­tions with these exter­nal groups through the Bronze and Iron Ages invig­o­rated and encour­aged the appro­pri­a­tion and adap­ta­tion of use­ful ideas, tech­nolo­gies, and mate­ri­als by local groups, includ­ing olive cul­ti­va­tion and pro­cess­ing,” Dodd wrote.

“The inte­gra­tion of mod­ern sci­en­tific approaches will con­tinue to play a grow­ing role in our abil­ity to untan­gle tra­jec­to­ries of the olive and its oil,” he con­cluded. ​“By com­bin­ing dis­parate tech­niques, we are able to inter­ro­gate new research ques­tions that add nuance and gran­u­lar­ity to our inter­pre­ta­tion of pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties.”