The Ancients - Origins of Olive Oil

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

When you think of inventions that helped change the course of history, it's doubtful Olive Oil makes the list. Originating thousands of years ago in the Mediterranean or further east - it's now probably in your kitchen cupboards, or donning the shelves of supermarkets. But how did Olive Oil come to be, and how did the processes behind making it help advance numerous civilisations?In this episode Tristan welcomes Curator of the British Museum's Ancient Levant and Anatolia department, Jamie Fraser, to talk about his work in Jordan and the incredible archaeological discoveries he and his team found. Looking at early Olive Oil production presses, monumental archaeology discoveries, and the impact this had on ancient civilisations - what can we learn about the origins of Olive Oil, and why is it so important in ancient history?Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, I am doing this intro from Central Asia, from Eastern Kazakhstan. I've got the sun rising right in front of me to the east, rising from above the Altai Mountains. Beyond that mountain range is China. I am here for a special project with the ancients and also with History Hit about Kazakhstan's ancient history and archaeology. Stay tuned for something special

that will be coming to the ancients very soon. In the meantime, we've got a very different episode for you today, but one that is equally interesting, fascinating, extraordinary, because we're talking about the origins of none other than olive oil. We're going to the Near East, to Jordan, to the Bronze Age, and the story of how and why olive oil comes about, and how important this commodity was to Bronze Age cultures of the Near East. To explain all about this, I was delighted to go and interview a few weeks back Dr. Jamie Fraser. Jamie, he is a curator at the British Museum, he is great fun and a fantastic speaker. You are going to absolutely love this one and be blown away by the amount of information, the archaeology that has survived surrounding the production of olive oil in antiquity.

I really do hope you enjoy and here's Jamie. really do hope you enjoy, and here's Jamie. Jamie, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. You're more than welcome, and for this topic, we've never ever covered olive oil on an Ancients podcast episode before. I think we take it for granted nowadays, but in ancient times, an incredibly important commodity that also seems to have contributed to the rise and fall of cities in the Bronze Age. Absolutely. I think the Middle East was always an oil economy. It was just a very green oil economy at the beginning. Well, if we start at the beginning, when does the story of

olive oil begin almost, the origins of olive oil? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of debate around this, but essentially, okay, let's go all the way back to the Ice Age, right? And so you've got olive trees populating the entire Mediterranean basin, then the Ice Age comes and they kind of retreat into three little areas. One in the west, so around Spain, one in the centre, sort of southern Italy, Sicily, and one in the east, so sort of southern Turkey, Syria, and the Jordan Valley, or at least the Escarpment above it. And those three zones develop into sort of individual species, if you like. Now, the debate focuses around which ones were domesticated first.

And like, honestly, this is throwing dynamite down a volcano in this debate because everyone thinks that their country is the place where it was domesticated first. However, if you go off the archaeological evidence, it's quite clear that it's the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly the Levant. And you can see this through the archaeological record of the Neolithic period. So the Neolithic process, or the domestication process of, say, wheat or barley, is very fast, because these are grains that are harvested every year or even twice a year. And so small changes in the morphology get magnified very quickly and amplified,

and so you turn a wild crop into a domestic crop with reasonable ease. Olive trees they take seven years before they're planted to start to fruit give or take and then of course they're there for hundreds some thousands of years and the oldest olive tree we had we know is actually from the bronze ages on Crete and so any changes in the morphology take a long time to take root, literally, I guess, and amplify. So we know that people in the Neolithic period are harvesting olives because we can see that. But when I'm talking about domestication,

what I mean is that there is a morphological change, a distinct change in what that looks like. So a wild olive, the seed is quite large, whereas domestic olive, the seed is quite small in comparison to the rest of the juice and the fruit of the actual olive itself. Because of course you don't want stone seed, you want the flesh and the oil that comes with it. So you can put two olive seeds side by side, one wild and one domestic, and they look quite different because of that process. So in the Neolithic period, we know that they're harvesting wild ones

because those seeds that survive are very distinct. There's some underwater archaeology that's just been done recently off the coast of Haifa for a Neolithic village site, and there's a bin full of these wild olive seeds. But at some point toward the late Neolithic and into the Chalcolithic period of the Southern Levant, that shifts a little bit and then you start to see, and this is a gradual process, but domestic olives taking charge. And that's at that point you've got this society where horticulture has become part of the fabric of the landscape and of the economy as well.

And I think that's a significant development towards complexity and towards urbanism that's particular to the Levant as opposed to civilizations such as the Sumerians in southern Iraq or the Egyptians in the Nile Valley or even the Harappans in the Indus. And that's because of the differences in landscape. And so in these early stages when olive oil has been processed and domesticated in this part of the world, do we know for what purposes olive oil was being used for? With olive oil, you can read in bed. I mean, OK, this is before the development of writing,

so I'm being a little facetious here. But no one in these early periods is using olives for their fruit. In fact, that doesn't really kick on where you put them in brine and eat them, right up until the sort of classical or even Roman period, probably. The oil, however, well that's revolutionary because you can light that, which means you can see in the dark and not just be tied to a fire, but you can move around with your fire and that's quite extraordinary. So think about the general social implications of having that and that's a huge development. So you get oil lands for the first time developing after you've got the domestication of oil, which makes a whole lot of sense.

It's also a preserving agent. You can use oil, particularly with dairy products, and dairy has only just started to come in online on a revolution that we'd call the secondary products revolution, where you're keeping sheep not just for their wool, but for their milk, or goats for their milk, and cheese and all that sort of stuff. Oil helps preserve. And of course for cooking, because oil transmits heat remarkably well. And so you get changes in cuisine. And so as oil grabs hold and becomes part of the fabric, part of the texture of these late prehistoric societies. You see the ripple on, the knock-on effect in a whole range of different sweets that

really transform, transforms these Levantine societies as to what it means to be a Levantine person. And no such thing as a silly question. Do we know how these prehistoric societies, how they processed it, how it went from the olive trees themselves into getting the oil for, let's say, their lamps? There's been a lot of archaeological work done, sort of bits and pockets. What we know a lot about is what they're doing in the Iron Age and the classical periods. I mean, the big Iron Age on classical olive presses, you know, large rock-cut installations with huge pressing installations. So in the Roman period, you get things called screw presses, you know, huge wooden platforms with a large screw, basically a bit of Meccano, but just on steroids, pressing, you know, huge amounts of olives flat

and exuding out their oil. In the late prehistoric period, at the very beginning, we don't know that much about it. And it seems to be a little at the very beginning we don't know that much about it and it seems to be a little different wherever you go and that's very much the thrust of what I'm doing in Jordan as part of my archaeological research. And I'm guessing therefore it doesn't take long before olive oil, you know this great wondrous discovery almost for these communities becomes an important trade commodity. Oh absolutely absolutely. And this is where I think it really intersects with the rise of early cities. And you cannot understand that. And this is why also the story of oil is critical to understanding the story of cities in the Levant, as opposed to

Mesopotamia or Egypt, because it shapes it very differently. So the key thing you need to know about olive trees, if you're ever going to start your own olive tree orchard, is that they have to be somewhere well-drained. They've got really woody roots. You get, say, an annual flood like the Nile Delta, and your trees will rot and die. So you don't have olive trees in the delta of the Nile. Same reason you don't have it in southern Iraq. These big cradles of these big civilizations, these are all forged on agricultural surplus. You know, wheat, barley, things that respond very well to these annual floods and the deposit of fertile silt and all of that. But, you know, should our ancient Egyptian farmer decide to go into the olive tree business, well, he would have been living on the couch of his brother for a very long time.

It wouldn't work. And this is where the Levant has a very different trajectory towards complexity and ultimately an urban expression. Because this is quite a hilly area along the Jordan Valley. You've got, you know, it's the continuation of the East African Rift Valley with this massive escarpment rising on either side so those large agricultural grain surpluses don't happen in the same way but upland tree crops do and so olives you know particularly in the refugia is the one of those zones after the ice age you've got this pockets of olive trees along the slopes lining the Jordan not in the Jordan Valley itself. That still is quite a boggy place but up on the escarpment of either side you've

got all these naturally growing olive trees which then have this pathway to domestication. And then your Egyptian traders realize, hang on, there's this really cool yellow stuff that's coming out of these far northern Asiatic Levantine places we could use that and so you start getting trade networks and in fact olive oil is probably probably one of the seven sacred oils that the Egyptians use in mummification so it has a real proper role to play as opposed to just lighting all that it has other cultural and cultic uses as well and

so in the very start of the early bronze age so we're talking sort of 3600 3500 give or take you start getting these wonderful trade networks between egypt and the southern levant abydos where this is this particular kind of pottery that was found in quantities in tombs in Abydos. This was thought very early on to be Egyptian because there's so much of it. It's all Canaan, all proto-Canaan. It's all coming from the southern Levant. These are probably oil jars being traded. They're the equivalent of the oil barrel today coming out of Saudi Arabia sort of thing,

but for a very different kind of oil. And so when we say say what does Levantine urbanism look like? Well, it's flourished. It's grown up very much, rising the tides of these large international trade networks. The problem for this, of course, is that trade networks shift and change. And a lot of these early networks between Egypt and the Levant are probably done overland. But as Egyptian maritime technology improves, a lot of Egyptian traders realize that actually they can sail up the coast of the Levant, bypass all these ports along the southern Levant, go straight for the northern Levant, by which I mean ports in sort of central northern Lebanon and Syria. And that's got the advantage with the winds and the currents. You can hook back via Cyprus, pick up a load of copper at the same time,

and then come back down to the Nile. And so you have this in the southern Levant, and by that, you know, we're talking Israel, Palestine, Jordan. You have these early urban or proto-urban societies that have flourished very much on the back of this oil trade. And suddenly this oil trade evaporates, it shifts, it moves elsewhere. And that has a fundamentally disastrous consequence on what these societies look like. So olive oil is so closely entwined, as we highlighted at the beginning, to what it seems from the archaeology, because of these trade routes, to the rise, and then the subsequent fall of these cities. I i mean what periods of time are we talking about with this yeah the collapse of the early bronze age urban experiment in the southern levant is

remarkable i mean you put six scholars in a room and ask them to ask you know to discuss the reasons for this you're going to get eight explanations and four broken limbs but these shifts in oil trade are absolutely one of them i mean there's probably climate and military incursions and all of this sort of stuff but fundamentally that shift on the oil trade from the south to the northern levant underpins why early urban societies in the southern levant shudder and then collapse and those in the northern Levant continue to flourish. It's a really interesting difference. And you cannot understand this without understanding the role of oil. So from about 3000 BC, give or take, through to about 2500 BC, this is a period that we call the early Bronze IV period, the end of the early bronze period. And this is the period that's in the shadow of this early urban flourish.

So the early bronze age, all up, starts around 3600 BC, give or take, and it rises, these village societies rise very fast to crystallize in early cities. And by that I mean nucleated settlements, you know, surrounded by large monumental fortification walls, institutions such as palaces and temples being controlled by ruling elite, a city for the want of a better term, then one by one they start to collapse, probably because this oil trade is drying up, is a significant part of that. And that process starts from about 3000 BC.

It's not a zombie apocalypse collapse. It's not everyone, you know, bury your gold and let's just head for the hills sort of thing. I think, well, I always try and explain it in my mind's eye is I imagine that I'm up in the International Space Station and I'm looking down at the Levant at night. And, you know, you've got all these lights from these cities and then one by one, they slowly flicker out and that process takes two three hundred

years all up but the consequence is that instead of people living in these nucleated cities you've got a very rural society where people have dispersed across the landscape and they're living in small villages again, like they did before this urban rise, in settlements that are one or two hectares in size. There's a few which are slightly bigger, but they're not surrounded by monumental fortification walls anymore. And it's a very rural, agro-pastoral society,

unlike what they were like 500, 600 years before. It's interesting, because when you mention that area of the world, people might think of, if you're talking about an ancient city, places, I don't know, maybe like Jericho or Jerusalem and the likes of those kind of places. Were those the kind of areas where you saw those cities rise and fall at that time? Or were there other examples of that across the southern Levant? Oh, Jericho is a really good example about this.

I mean, it's one of the ones that gets abandoned in this kind of process. Jerusalem gets settled a little later, probably small pockets of early bronze settlement, but not what we're talking about. But the main ones you get, certainly in the Southern Levant, are along the Jordan Valley. And so that Jordan Valley is this below-sea-level channel gouged between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee or Lake Tiberias.

And then on either side, these massive escarpments rising up as it is the northern continuation of the East African Rift Valley. And so particularly at the confluence of some of the side rivers, you know, I think the Zaka or the Amur coming into the Jordan River itself, and you get these massive, well, for the southern Levant, large cities flourishing and you know we're talking cities that are 10, 12, 14 hectares in size. Nothing like the equivalent size cities in southern Mesopotamia. Ur or Uruk are probably a hundred hectares in size. This urbanism is a different sort of scale but it's a different sort of landscape. That's kind of the point, I think.

You have to understand the trajectory towards this thing as being a different pathway for this part of the world. And we've had the Mesopotamian examples cast a very long shadow for a very long time. So I think in understanding these differences, we can start to articulate these different pathways towards urbanism and complexity and why it collapses. Well we've now therefore set the context to this all the rise and fall of these cities in the Bronze Age along the Jordan Valley so let's now focus in on this archaeological case study that you and your team have been working on that helps explain further kind of what happens next.

I've got in my notes right in front of me, please correct me if I get the translation of it wrong, Khurbet al-Ghazlan. First off, where is this site and then what is it? It's just beautifully said. Oh, thank you very much. Wonderfully said. Khurbet al-Ghazlan is Arabic for Khurbet, the ruins. Um al-Ghazlan, the ruins of the mother of the gazelles, which is a lovely kind of phrase, I think. We're talking northern Jordan, but we're talking that escarpment, that huge rise of uplands from the Jordan Valley up to the Transjordan Plateau. And so this in itself is about 400 meters above sea level, but this is the area that's very well drained, which means it's the area where once upon a time,

wild olive trees are growing and now you've got massive domesticated orchards of olive and other upland tree crops, such as pomegranate, fig and grape and all that sort of stuff. So if you imagine a map in your mind, you know, sort of think, say where Lake Tiberias is, head down about 20 kilometers and then head up into the hills to the east of that. And it's along a wadi or a very steep sided valley called the Wadi al-Rayyan. And once upon a time, up until the mid nineties, actually, this was called the Wadi al-Yabis, which means the dry and the barren. And in the mid nineties, the Jordanian king went, this is ridiculous. This is one of the best watered, most beautiful green wadis in the mid-90s, the Jordanian king went, this is ridiculous. This is one of the best watered, most beautiful green wadis in the entire country. We're going to call it the rayan, the fertile,

the abundant, the verdant. And one of the reasons I like to work there, I mean, when you're an undergraduate, you're always told, work near a beach or a pub. Jordan is fairly thin on the ground for both. What it does have, however, is extraordinary beauty. And the Wadi Rayyan is stunningly beautiful and particularly in the springtime, sort of March, April, where it's just carpeted in wildflowers. And it really is the most amazingly beautiful, gorgeous place to work. You know, I'm about to break out into a song like Sister Maria, but it is a wonderful place to be. Hello, host of Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast here. History isn't just dates and facts.

It's about the incredible stories that shape our world. Three times a week on my podcast, my expert guests and I bring you extraordinary stories of heroism, discovery, mystery and power. Expect tales of lost tombs, daring escapes, power hungry rulers and those determined to bring them all down. If you're a history lover or just looking for a good tale, you want to check out Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so when did you and the team talk us through the whole story of it? Did you realise that this location, well, it had potential, archaeological potential for being this Bronze Age centre of olive oil production?

Yeah, well, like many things, you kind of stumble onto it by accident, I think. And along the Wadi Rayyan, I'd been surveying, as part of my PhD research, a large field of monumental stone tombs called dolmens. I think dolmens like in Europe, and it's a Breton term meaning stone table. They do these above- ground massive stone tables. There's biblical literature that talks about one of the kings in this sort of area being a giant. And one of the theories is that because some of the biblical writers are looking at these dolmens in the landscape and looking at them as kind of gigantic furniture. Either way, I was doing landscapes of mortuary, funerary activity and looking at these tombs and so we'd been spent several seasons surveying all these you know hundreds thousands of these dolmens along the ridge line above what would now be Herbert Umolkos Lan and then we surveyed this came to this site and Herbert Umolkos

Lan sits on the top of a very steep-sided knoll it's a very pronounced defensible place in the landscape actually that juts out above the wadi so on most sides apart from getting remarkable panoramic views it's it's kind of inaccessible and there's one very low saddle that connects it to a ridgeline and we'd walk down this and discover this archaeological site and an archaeologist had already been there and recorded the site in the late 1980s anyway so we knew it would be there but what i was unprepared for was the the weirdness of it because when you cross the saddle onto the site there's a massive monumental or the ruins of a massive monumental stone blocking wall or fortification wall done in

large huge large boulders i mean we're having this conversation on either side of my desk here at the British Museum and this would be swamped by these massive boulders. Cyclopean. Yeah, sort of, yeah, unworked but there. But then you cross over them onto the Null and it's tiny. And why on earth would you go to the trouble of blocking off, it's probably not fortifying it from invading armies, but it of blocking off, it's probably not fortifying it from invading armies, but it's checking access, it's controlling access to that defensible knoll in the landscape. And why on earth would you do that? And then of course as we surveyed,

as an earlier archaeologist guy called Gaetano Palumbo discovered, it's full of early Bronze IV pottery. This period where people have dispersed out of cities and come to be throughout the landscape. But you open a textbook about the early Bronze IV, and one of the first things that it says is that all these kind of urban checklist features, large palaces, large temples, monumental city walls, well, they get abandoned and people go back to their small farming communities. Well, this was the size of a small farming community, but it still had these kind of urban aspects. Why defend it to go to such lengths? And we couldn't explain that. So I, you know, stuck this in the back of my brain, went back and finished my PhD and got all that published. And then there's a wonderful project called the Apami Project. This is a

project run out of Oxford in Western Australia that does photographic images of sites in Jordan. And every year they send an email out to people working. They're saying, okay, anyone need any aerial photographs? And if we're going in your area, we'll take them at the same time. Generous, wonderful collegial research institution initiative so I sent back the coordinates of this site, Koberlmuggelsland, and said well from the air it must tell us a bit more and they flew over and they sent back an image and it was a wonderful thing you could really see how the people there had been using that saddle to block the site and then you know you could get a trace line of the

wall going around the entire site but much much smaller where it didn't need to be larger where it drops off but what that photograph also showed and this is 2016 at this point was that part of the site had recently been destroyed the farmer had bulldozed through just clipped the edge of it bulldozing a road to make expand his olive orchard production his olive orchards along the ridgeline. And so the site was threatened. And so I thought, well, let's go back and do some rescue archaeology. But there's no point digging for the sake of digging. And meanwhile, I'd been wondering why to go to this length. And so a colleague here at the British Museum in our scientific department, she's an

archaeobotanist, her name is Dr. Caroline Cartwright, we were wondering why on earth you would defend this small site. And one of the hypotheses, you know, the best hypothesis we could come up with is that in the early Bronze Fall, one of the most valuable commodities is olive oil. And this site was smack bang in the olive oil producing region of Jordan. And that harvest happens sort of in October. It's late September, October, or October, November. There's about six weeks where olive oil gets harvested. And part of that is you have to leave the vats in one area, usually a dark area, for a couple of weeks just to settle

so that the olive oil and the water, because there's always a bit of water in it, sort of separates and you pure it and refine it off but that means producing somewhere in the having a point somewhere in the landscape where you've got a cluster for a very short period of time of your most valuable commodity and that needs to be defended and we thought well could be one of these kind of olive oil bank vaults in the landscape I mean this seems to explain that wall but you know no one has looked into this before we didn't really know and like any good idea you can only get so far before you just have to break out your

trowel and go and have a look and that's exactly what we did and so what types of artifacts would you therefore have been, or were you therefore looking for when you started excavating there that would kind of reveal whether this was the centre of olive oil production, as you mentioned at this time following the collapse almost of cities in this area of the world? It's a great question and there's a whole lot of them. I mean what you're essentially asking is what is the archaeological signatures of olive oil production, and particularly for pre-classical periods where not a huge amount has been done. And so we wanted to find things like rock-cut press features and what they might look like. There's going to be certain types of processing installations,

maybe large grindstones and things for breaking down the fruit into the pulp that needs to then be pressed. There's going to be certain vessel types for storing and for pouring olive oil. But perhaps the biggest smoking gnu, if you're a Terry Pratchett fan or a smoking gun if you're not, is the olives themselves, the olive pits. And not complete pits, but crushed pits. pits and not complete pits but crushed pits so if you're crushing fruit that crushed pits it called even now in in arabic jift and even today that jift is still a valuable commodity once the olive oil has been extracted people take that jift those crushed olive stones and they use them for fuel and so if we're getting we're finding a lot of jift that would be our smoking gun that olive pressing had been happening in the area.

And that's what Carolinas and Archaeobotanists was absolutely key to this project. And I think, and I really strongly mean this to anyone, you know, about to start your archaeological excavations at X or Y, you know, you build in that scientific component from the very beginning. It's not something you tag on to the end. You build into your research questions and your research methodology and so this excavation has been very much a collaboration between me as an 11th archaeologist and caroline as an archaeobotanist and together i think we can do some really cool things and that that's as it turns out what we've been able to do which has been fantastic well we'll focus on that kind of those organic materials but

actually like within this enclosed area, when you were excavating, I mean, how many structures did you eventually find that seemed to have been involved in this whole process? Yeah, so we've opened up many trenches now. And we, you know, first of all, we did them on either side of that defensive wall because we wanted to prove it.

You know, there was surface pottery from the early Bronze IV, but there's no point asking this question if the whole thing turned out to be Roman period. But no, we were able to demonstrate that it was built in the early Bronze IV. But one of the other things we were able to demonstrate was that it was the first thing that was built there. So that some people at some point arrived on that knoll, took out their IKEA plans on how to build an olive oil processing centre and went, right, first thing is we need, we need to block this off. It's not an organic thing that happened as an afterthought. It was the first thing. We can tell that because that was built first, and then against that, other walls have been sat. So, you know, we'd call that

butting rather than bonding, where one wall's been built and then another one's been built against it. And then off that comes other sort of smaller retaining walls but essentially what you've got is a storage area and then in this storage area one large structure with very small rooms in it and then within these rooms we were finding dense concentrations of storage jars and then we've since found next to that another larger area of probably sort of squatted domestic occupation. Although I don't think people were living there all the year, I think this is somewhere that they're coming to just for the olive harvest and then leaving again for the season. So a temporary seasonal production site. Actually, I'll ask therefore about these

jars themselves. Have you been able to do scientific analysis of them to see if there's any residue within them? Great question. Yes, we have. And again, our scientists are Lisa Briggs. She's a scientist who's been working at the British Museum on lipid residue analysis. So she came out in field with us because it's really important if you're doing sampling that I think the scientist does that from the dirt right up to the lab. And Lisa was able to look at, you know, collect some samples from some of these jars and then look at it for lipid residues and sure enough there are proteins there that you associate with degraded vegetable fats and you know in this case olive oil and so that starts to build quite a strong case

but from an archaeological sort of ceramicist point of view what i find compelling is that you know 80 70 75 to 80 percent of all our ceramics are storage jars and that's a huge proportion now what we're not getting are a lot of the the smaller kind of cups bowls serving platters the domestic kind of occupation they're there but this ceramic assemblage the flavor of it is overwhelmingly storage and large storage jars for probably putting oil in. And then many of them have spouts coming off their shoulder, their high shoulder. Now, think about that.

If you think of a jar that's maybe, you know, it's bigger than your forearm, right? Fill that with liquid, in particular oil, but fill it with liquid. You can't really pick it up and pour it out. It's too heavy. It's too cumbersome. So why have the spout, a tubular spout enclosed coming off the shoulder? I don't think these are for pouring. I think these are decanting fats. So imagine that being full of oil. You've just pressed your oil and then you've got to wait for a few weeks because particularly in these

pre-classical olive presses, there's still a lot of water within that juice. So that juice and that oil separates. This is by density, of course. So the oil goes to the top and the water goes to the bottom, which means you can pour it off the top where the oil is very easily, particularly if you pour more water in, it forces the oil out and you decant a much purer product away. And so these things are part of this as well. Lisa's tested these too and wouldn't you know, full of the same kind of degraded proteins associated with olive oils. But it's amazing, because what you highlighted earlier was that, you know, when you have descriptions of olive oil production in antiquity, it's largely from the Iron Age, from Greek and Roman times.

This is a fascinating example in the Levant, you and the team have been doing, where the archaeology has been so pretty well preserved within this enclosure, that you're able to start piecing together how they would have gone about processing this oil several thousand years ago, in this time almost seen as a dark age in Bronze Age history, in this area.

Yeah, and it's been called a dark age. And I think the whole, the driving force for this excavation, I mean, the research question is, is this a site used to make olive oil production? And if so, what does that look like? But the larger question, I guess, is, well, to what extent is olive oil still part of this post-urban economy? And does it have a role to play in its rejuvenation and I think what we're showing quite clearly is that you know this is a strong part what was once something produced for international trade has been reconstituted reconfigured in these kind of local networks but by maintaining

that that process this industry it means the economy is there ready to go to supercharge into what would become the middle Bronze Age urban fluorescence, which would turn into the civilization that we would later call the Canaanites. And you can't understand that without understanding these processes which is kept alive during this so-called Dark Age, which are actually quite sophisticated and ongoing. And for what was what you hired to there so can we imagine that the people who would have been working at this processing place as you say

topographically at the top of this incredibly quite strategic position but do you think the people they would have been those who are living in those spread out farming settlements and venturing here to do the work but not stay in there long term? We don't know, but we're finding out. And look, I'll tell you what I think, and then I'll tell you how we're looking at it. So what I think is that most people at this point in this sort of vicinity are living down in the Jordan Valley. You know, that's next to the Jordan River.

There's good sources of water. There's no main source of water up on Koopapuzlan. It's too high on a knoll. You wouldn't live there all the time. But down in the Jordan Valley you are, and a lot of farming places. And there's a village called Tel Abu-En-Niyaj, which is just at the mouth of this wadi rayyan that Kerber-Muguzlan is on. But quite near where the river from that wadi flows into the main Jordan River. And there's a lot of work that's been done there by the University of Arizona.

They've looked at all the science and the archaeobotany and the fauna, and they absolutely bog-standard what you would expect a village to be full of farming people staying there all the time, creating rubbish, creating mess, eating wheat, eating barley, eating pomegranates, eating sheep, eating goats, all of this sort of stuff. Absolutely standard. The signatures that they're getting from Tel Abu Niiyaj, even though it's only about 7km away, are fundamentally different from the signatures of Kerbet al-Mulkus land, despite

them being occupied at the same time. But I suspect it's people coming out of villages like that on the Jordan Valley, not the whole village, but some people, who are coming up to the uplands during the olive harvest time to harvest the fruit, to press the fruit, and then to transport those oil jars back, carefully on the backs of donkeys and saddlecloths probably, down to the Jordan Valley. And remember, the Jordan Valley is its lowland flood zone. You can't grow olive trees there. And so what we're seeing in this so-called dark age is some quite interesting, innovative use of these kind of micro-environmental niches.

And so you're seeing people living permanently in one place and yet kind of being seasonal as well. And I think we don't understand that enough, this kind of blurred depth to what it is to be urban or proto-urban all this sort of stuff that people using the landscape in different ways it is so interesting and i know we're in the realm now of speculation but to think of you know people journeying up there during that olive oil the harvesting season there are those who would have been at the site doing the whole process working in those storage places and overseeing the creation of this olive oil but at the same time you've highlighted you know these monumental walls this enclosure i guess you can also imagine that there were some people who would have been alongside those walls looking out perhaps people trying to obtain olive

oil by maybe not the best methods almost and maybe they're trying to defend their prized product against those who might want to take it for their own goods. Yeah, and this is really sailing into waters of speculation. But it's archaeology, that's what we do. I don't know, but the fact that they've felt that it's necessary to create that kind of defensive wall, and they did that first, tells us that's clearly, I think, clearly a point of concern. Who they thought they needed to protect this olive oil from, that's a different issue,

whether they're sort of marauding kind of nomadic peoples, although that is kind of the known unknowns of Middle Eastern archaeology, to paraphrase Donald Trump. An easy go-to explanation that I think is quite lazy sometimes. I think we've got to think differently about what we would call the function of a protective or defensive war. I think in this case, it is doing that, but it's much more, I think, a statement of ownership, perhaps. And I don't think this is ever a point where you've got, you know, everyone's grabbed their weapons and they're sitting on there waiting for an attack, I suspect. This is one or two young guys, you know, playing on their mobile phones or the equivalent, just so that if there are other people moving through this landscape, and the Wadi Ray aren't.

These wadis are these kinds of highways of movement. They can be perched on the top of the wall and another family or a group of a tribe walks past and they're like, no, no, nothing to see here, keep moving on. And I think in that case it's much more of it's an ownership thing it's negotiating access into certain parts of the landscape it's kind of like actually some of the hill forts in britain where now people think maybe there's a defensive aspect but actually it's a symbol of power and authority by those who owned it as you say controlling that landscape and showing out to others you know what what they

had control over this This has been absolutely brilliant, Jamie. I must ask a couple of questions before we completely wrap up. I mean, what do we think ultimately happens to this particular production center of olive oil? My one problem is that I don't have radiocarbon dates yet. Caroline's refining that at the moment. We're about to send them off. That's really important because this site is used very discreetly. I don't think it's used for more than a generation. And I say that because you dig an archaeological site and you get buildup of detritus, you know, just from the ash from the hearth, just generally people being there. We are a really messy species. And that isn't there. And the architecture shows, I think, this is a very discreet phase. So it's a moment to kind of blip on a much larger

continuum. Now the early Bronze IV spans 500, 600 years. So let's call it 2500 through to 2000 BC, give or take, right? Or 2600 to 2000 BC, roughly. And at some point during that large envelope, people are using Kerberos-Lahn. We don't know precisely when yet. Our pottery chronology doesn't nail that down. The radiocarbon dates will. But that's important because halfway through that period, there's an event called the 4.2 KY event.

This is a massive shift in climate where the world gets a lot drier. Someone called it a period of aridification. But once upon a time, it was this shifting climate that was thought to cause the early Bronze IV collapse and the sudden event. We now know that that was happening already. But I want to know, was this olive oil factory at Goslar, was that used before then?

In which case, it's kind of the last gasp of urbanism reconfigured before it really gets hit by this shifting climate? Or does it happen slightly after it, in which case people are responding to this climate in interesting ways, sowing what would become the kind of the seeds for that urban rejuvenation? It's a very significant point, and it's one that we don't have, ceramically, the resolution to answer. But scientifically, with radiocarbon, we will, and hopefully in the next few months. But the implications are quite profound. Implications are quite profound, and it further emphasises, doesn't it, the importance of this commodity for these communities. No matter what is happening with the larger climate or the rise

and fall of these cities, this commodity remains important, and it will continue to remain important for thousands of years following it down i guess until the present day absolutely i mean jordan still relies very heavily on olive oil production olive oil export and for me as an archaeologist working there i mean the biggest most impressive treasure these small tiny flecks of olive oil crushed olive oil seeds that have been burned as fuel or even olive oil seeds that have been burned as fuel, or even olive oil wood that's been burned as fuel, which Caroline is able to look under

her scanning electron microscope in the laboratory. I mean, these are tiny bits of, you know, stuff you see on flypaper. But it's remarkable to get those, and we do it out of flotation, soil flotation, because they tell us so much. And, I mean, I was asked many years ago, why did you become an archaeologist? I could only answer the words of a famous South African archaeologist, Carmel Schreer.

She was asked that same question. She said, archaeology is fabulous. You get to drive around in a Land Rover smoking, cursing, and finding treasure, which is absolutely the reason why I became an archaeologist. and finding treasure, which is absolutely the reason why I became an archaeologist. But in this case, the treasure here is not, you know, large gold vessels or spectacular crystal drinking cups or anything. It's this tiny little specks of burnt olive, crushed olive stones, which are nothing. And yet they tell us so much.

Treasures in their own way. Jamie, this has been brilliant. Lastly, what's next for the excavations in Jordan? Or I guess for this site, but I mean for you larger in general too. Well, at the site, we've now done four seasons of excavations and I'm itching to get back. However, I'm going to sit on my troweling hand and we're going to write up what we found and publish that first of all and then we'll go back once that publication is out because it's tremendously important to communicate what you found rather than just accumulating unpublished materials. Middle Eastern archaeology alas is

littered with the corpses of unpublished projects and this will not be one of them I promise you but for me well I mean I've been working here at the British Museum on an exhibition called Luxury in Power Persia to Greece that finishes up in a few weeks from now in the middle of August. And then I take a new job, which is the director of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, and that's in East Jerusalem. And I can't wait. Well, best of luck. And I can't wait also to come over there and see your stuff firsthand in the near future. It's going to be brilliant, Jim. Ah, lan fiek, you must.

Well, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you well there you go there was dr jamie fraser talking all things the origins of olive oil i don't think we've had an episode quite like the origins of olive oil on the ancient so i really do hope you enjoyed the episode stay tuned there are so many many more episodes to come now last things from me you know what i'm going to say but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out as we get more and more ambitious as we aim for even greater heights well you know what you can do you can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from.

It really helps us as we continue our mission to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me, dialing out from East Kazakhstan, and I will see you in the next episode.