Prehistory | American Journal of Archaeology

The Archaeology of Olive Oil Production in Roman and Pre-Roman Italy

website — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:12:36 +0000

This article provides a comprehensive synthesis and re-evaluation of the archaeological evidence for olive cultivation and oil production across Italy from prehistory through the Roman era. Italy is often neglected in studies of ancient olives and oil, with greater focus given to the eastern Mediterranean or Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. Extant studies on Italian regions fail to capture broader patterns and transregional developments. Scientific advancements, more rigorous sampling strategies, and a rapidly expanding paleoenvironmental and archaeological dataset encourage an updated state of the field. Traditional assumptions regarding the sparse prehistory of olive exploitation prior to Greek or Phoenician contact are challenged by growing paleoenvironmental evidence highlighting Neolithic and Bronze Age activity. This is complemented by indications of pre- and early Roman oil production sites, including perhaps the earliest rotary olive crusher. Substantial Roman-era oil production was not confined to southern Italy but occurred more widely across the peninsula using a diverse range of facilities, including large villas, farms, and rudimentary rural installations. Regional biases remain along with significant gaps in evidence, both geographically (e.g., Sardinia) and in terms of material culture (e.g., a notable scarcity of milling apparatus) compared with other regions.

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Hacımusalar Höyük in the Early Bronze Age

website — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 04:00:00 +0000

Excavations at Hacımusalar Höyük in southwestern Turkey have uncovered thousands of years of occupation history, from the Early Bronze Age through the Late Byzantine era. This article offers a general survey of the Bronze Age occupation levels so far explored on the northern and western slopes of the mound, with particular focus on two well-preserved Early Bronze II destruction levels, closely superimposed. We present selected finds and architectural features from each stratigraphic level in sequence and discuss their significance for current theories of cultural interaction and social organization in West Anatolia in the Early Bronze Age. This new evidence indicates that Hacımusalar Höyük and the Elmalı plain were more connected with other parts of Anatolia than recent studies of Early Bronze Age cultural zones suggest but still maintained a distinctive regional character.

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Fieldwork at Ancient Eleon in Boeotia, 2011–2018

website — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 04:00:00 +0000

This article presents the results of the first excavations at the site of ancient Eleon in eastern Boeotia, Greece. Fieldwork focused on the elevated limestone ridge on the western edge of the village of Arma about 14 km east of Thebes. The chronological framework of the excavated remains includes pottery dating from Early Helladic II through early Middle Helladic found in secondary contexts and not associated with any architectural remains. Funerary activity began during the Middle Helladic period, reaching a peak both in terms of the number of graves and monumentality in Late Helladic I. An impressive burial complex, the Blue Stone Structure, is contemporary with other cemeteries of the Shaft Grave period in southern and central Greece. During the Mycenaean Palatial period, contemporary with references to the toponym e-re-o-ni (Eleon) in Linear B tablets found at Thebes, activity on the site included significant craft production. Occupation continued directly into Postpalatial periods (Late Helladic IIIC Early and Middle), through several phases of building, destruction, and reconstruction. By the sixth century BCE, the construction of the large polygonal wall along the eastern edge of the plateau and an array of ceramics and figurines, of local, Corinthian, and Attic origins in secondary deposition, indicate renewed occupation.

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Rethinking Household-Based Production at Ayia Irini, Kea: An Examination of Technology and Organization in a Bronze Age Community of Practice

website — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 04:00:00 +0000

Analyses of the organization of craft production in prehistoric societies have tended to build on evolutionary, typological models that see domestic, household-based production as simple, small-scale, and unspecialized in contrast to workshop production. Such models, however, overlook archaeological and ethnographic evidence for craftspeople in domestic contexts who operate at intensive scales of production and participate in regional exchange networks. The potential for domestic production to be a significant force in local economies and regional exchange networks is, therefore, something to be evaluated on its own terms. This article examines diachronic evidence for the organization of pottery production at the site of Ayia Irini on the Cycladic island of Kea and argues that multiple, probably household-based producers were operating there throughout the Middle and Late Bronze Age. The adoption of new technologies and shifts in local production are evaluated as part of a complex process of regional interaction and mobility in which craftspeople played key roles as agents of material culture change.

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The End of the Kura-Araxes Culture as Seen from Nadir Tepesi in Iranian Azerbaijan

website — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 04:00:00 +0000

By the late fourth to early third millennium B.C.E., Kura-Araxes (Early Transcaucasian) material culture spread from the southern Caucasus throughout much of southwest Asia. The Kura-Araxes settlements declined and ultimately disappeared in almost all the regions in southwest Asia around the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. The transition to the “post–Kura-Araxes” time in the southern Caucasus is one of the most tantalizing subjects in the archaeology of the region. Despite current knowledge on the origins and spread of the Kura-Araxes culture, little is known about the end of this cultural horizon. In this field report, we argue that the Kura-Araxes culture in the western Caspian littoral plain ended abruptly and possibly violently. To demonstrate this, we review the current hypotheses about the end of the Kura-Araxes culture and use results from excavations at Nadir Tepesi in Iranian Azerbaijan.

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Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

website — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 16:38:22 +0000

In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia’s earliest farmers.

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The Brown University Petra Archaeological Project: Landscape Archaeology in the Northern Hinterland of Petra, Jordan

website — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 15:28:44 +0000

In three field seasons, between 2010 and 2012, the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP) conducted a diachronic archaeological survey of the northern hinterland of Petra, Jordan. While regional reconnaissance has a long history in Jordan, it has rarely been conducted with the “intensive” methodologies today characteristic of projects elsewhere, most proximately in the Mediterranean. Such an approach is ideally suited for the territory north of Petra, the setting for a wide-ranging variety of human activity from the Lower Paleolithic to the present. The survey component of BUPAP, the Petra Area and Wadi Silaysil Survey (or PAWS), covered some 1,000 ha (10 km2), most of which was traversed by closely spaced (10 m) fieldwalking in 1,321 individual survey units. In the course of this work, PAWS recorded patterns in the distribution of tens of thousands of artifacts. In addition, more than 1,000 individual archaeological features were identified and documented; geophysical survey was conducted in several areas; and test excavations were carried out in 10 locations of particular interest. This article provides an overview of the PAWS survey and related activity—discussing motivations, methods, and results—and touches on key issues concerning the long-term human history of the study area.

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The Value of Sharing: Seal Use, Food Politics, and the Negotiation of Labor in Early Bronze II Mainland Greece

aja — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 14:39:34 +0000

Although the importance of seal use on the Greek mainland during the Early Bronze Age has long been recognized, its significance still remains difficult to grasp. The pervasive priority given to the analysis of social complexity has meant that seal use is addressed as part of an early administrative apparatus employed to control the distribution of goods. The failure of the material to meet the expectations raised by this interpretation is often ignored and has yet to spur a reconsideration of the theoretical grounds on which analysis of seal use was built. Highlighting that such difficulties are the result of particular demands placed on this material, demands that are shaped, in turn, by untested assumptions about the function of the sealings, this article proposes the significance of seal use as a value-producing and transformative material practice. In this framework, it brings forward and discusses the employment of Early Bronze Age II (Early Helladic II) sealings in the organization of food practices as sustaining the circulation of agricultural labor. This reorientation is consonant with a more general shift from seeking to identify predetermined social formations with their concomitant modes of material management to placing strategies of goods reallocation within a continuous, and significantly open-ended, process of social association.

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Chronological Contexts of the Earliest Pottery Neolithic in the South Caucasus: Radiocarbon Dates for Göytepe and Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe, Azerbaijan

aja — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 13:39:45 +0000

Research on the earliest Neolithic in the South Caucasus is still in its early stages. Establishing a solid chronological framework will help determine the timing of the emergence and subsequent development of regional Neolithic societies. This article reports on 46 radiocarbon dates obtained from the two recently excavated Early Pottery Neolithic sites of Göytepe and Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe, the oldest farming villages known to date in West Azerbaijan. Comparing the dates from other related sites demonstrates that several settlements representing the earliest Pottery Neolithic emerged almost simultaneously at the beginning of the sixth millennium B.C.E. in the northern and southern foothills of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains. The lack of evidence for plant cultivation or animal husbandry at earlier sites suggests a foreign origin for agricultural economies in the South Caucasus. However, cultural items characterizing the initial agropastoral communities were not brought to the region as a package. Instead, we suggest that these early farming communities—that is, the Shomutepe-Shulaveri—underwent gradual but significant autochthonous developments likely deriving from the aceramic stage. The chronological framework provided by Göytepe and Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe serves as a reference point for identifying details of early farmers’ cultural developments in the South Caucasus.

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“Minding the Gap”: Against the Gaps. The Early Bronze Age and the Transition to the Middle Bronze Age in the Northern and Eastern Aegean/Western Anatolia

aja — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 13:49:53 +0000

Gaps are not desirable in archaeology, whether they refer to cultural gaps or to gaps in research. When Rutter defined a “gap” between the Early Cycladic IIB and Middle Cycladic I/Middle Helladic I assemblages, it was evident that there existed a real gap in archaeological research of the prehistoric landscapes and islandscapes of the northern and eastern Aegean and of western Anatolia, to the south of Troy. This short article discusses the rich archaeological evidence of the Aegean Early Bronze Age that has accumulated over the past 30 years. It emphasizes cultural dialogues that existed between the eastern Aegean Islands and western Anatolian littoral, on the one hand, and between both of these areas and the Cyclades, mainland Greece, and Crete, on the other; these dialogues are obvious in technology (pottery, metallurgy), in the development of trade networks, in the evolution of political and social practices, in symbolic expressions, and finally in the transformation of the parallel lives of the Early Bronze Age Aegean societies.

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