Distinguishing exploitation, domestication, cultivation and production: the olive in the third millennium Aegean

Margaritis reassesses olive use in the Aegean from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, with most attention to the third millennium. The evidence is archaeobotanical: pollen cores, charcoal, carbonised olive stones, pottery residues and grinding tools, with a table of sites ranked by the number of stones recovered, in bands from fewer than ten to more than 400. She also takes in finds from graves and other ritual contexts, and points out that storage, disposal and recovery practices all affect how visible plant remains are.

Olive charcoal appears from the Late Neolithic, olive stones become more frequent in the Early Bronze Age, and signs of oil use and processing precede the Second Palace period. For processing, she considers fragmented stones at Chamalevri, stones found with mortars and pounders at Heraion, grinding tools at Papadiokambos and Mochlos, and spouted vats at Myrtos and Knossos, with early second-millennium examples from Malia and Zou. The chronology is based on the dates assigned to the sites and contexts discussed.

She argues that systematic recovery programmes have changed the picture, and that the earlier apparent absence of Early Bronze Age olive stones reflected poor recovery. Cultivation, which she treats as a human activity, is kept apart from domestication, a set of plant attributes, and she proposes studying how people managed trees and processed fruit. At Dhaskalio, pruning for wood, fuel and fodder may have raised fruit production over time. She concludes that olive trees were managed extensively by the third millennium and that wood, fruit and oil were all available as resources in the Early Bronze Age. Small-scale cultivation and pressing came before specialised production, and whether domestication happened locally or involved imported trees is left open.