One of the Oldest Examples of Nonnative Olive Cultivation Uncovered in Jordan Valley

New evi­dence has emerged of cul­ti­vated olive groves dat­ing back 7,000 years in the Central Jordan Valley, about 32 kilo­me­ters south of the Sea of Galilee in present-day Israel.

A new study has inves­ti­gated ancient set­tle­ments and their remains in an area known as Tel Tsaf, find­ing that there was a pros­per­ous and flour­ish­ing soci­ety at the time ded­i­cated to grow­ing wheat, bar­ley and olives.

According to the arche­ol­o­gists who worked on the research pub­lished by Scientific Report, it is one of the ear­li­est exam­ples of humans grow­ing olives.

“To describe it, [we can say] that it is the ear­li­est known evi­dence of olives being farmed out­side their nat­u­rally-occur­ring range,” Dafna Langgout, from the Institute of Archeology at Tel Aviv University and co-author of the study, told Olive Oil Times.

Among hun­dred of charred wood sam­ples col­lected on the site, arche­ol­o­gists iden­ti­fied many olive remains.

While seeds and fruits found in a spe­cific loca­tion may come from other regions, it is believed that recov­er­ing the remains of wood means that the plant must have grown in the vicin­ity, the researchers explained in the paper.

“Tellingly, the Central Jordan Valley is located out­side the nat­ural dis­tri­b­u­tion area of wild olives,” they wrote. ​“Consequently, the recov­ery of charred olive wood remains at Tel Tsaf pro­vides strong evi­dence for olive orchards near the site. A few char­coal remains of olive as well as some olive stones were also reported in pre­vi­ous stud­ies.”

In neigh­bor­ing regions, wild olive trees used to thrive with many other species, such as oaks, tamarisks, white aca­cia and pis­ta­chios. In Tel Tsaf, though, the olive trees were imported by the local pop­u­la­tion, a phe­nom­e­non which also shows that olive plant­ing knowl­edge had been estab­lished.

The study focuses on arche­o­log­i­cal and botan­i­cal evi­dence, which ​“sug­gests that olive cul­ti­va­tion began in north­ern Israel (Carmel coast and the Galilee) almost 8,000 years ago.”

The sci­en­tists believe that it mainly con­cerned wild olive species.

“A few cen­turies later, at the begin­ning of the Middle Chalcolithic period… the set­tlers of Tel Tsaf engaged in full-fledged olive cul­ti­va­tion, indi­cated by their loca­tion out­side Olea Europaea​’s nat­ural dis­tri­b­u­tion,” researchers wrote. ​“To accom­plish this geo­graph­i­cal shift, a trans­fer of both knowl­edge and genetic olive mate­r­ial from north­ern Israel to the Central Jordan Valley must have occurred.”

The research found that the local pop­u­la­tion was deeply involved in agri­cul­ture, hav­ing built large struc­tures to stock food, mostly cere­als. The study’s authors explained that each build­ing of the set­tle­ments had four to five rounded silos, amount­ing to a 20 to 30 tons stor­age capac­ity.

“They greatly exceeded the inhab­i­tants’ needs, indi­cat­ing the oper­a­tions of a com­plex eco­nomic sys­tem of sur­plus and wealth accu­mu­la­tion,” the researchers wrote.

Such com­plex­ity is due to a ​“sophis­ti­cated sys­tem of pro­duc­tion, pos­si­bly includ­ing fer­til­iz­ers, irri­ga­tion sys­tems and field man­age­ment prac­tices, such as incor­po­rat­ing fal­low peri­ods into the crop rota­tions,” they added.

That also shows a soci­ety that could plant new crops, such as olive trees, the yields of which would have required years to develop.

According to Langgout, the Tel Tsaf soci­ety was unusu­ally wealthy com­pared to oth­ers, ​“liv­ing in a mode of sur­vival.”

“They had time to invest in some­thing with a long-term invest­ment with a rel­a­tively delayed return,” the researchers wrote. ​“It is pos­si­ble that a fruit tree plan­ta­tion would not assume its full yield poten­tial within the short adult life­time of the planter 7000-years-ago, due to the long juve­nile period of some of the fruit tree types.”

The researchers believe that olives con­sti­tuted one lux­ury item that could have played a role in trad­ing with other pop­u­la­tions.

“Cultivated olive and fig trees pro­duced prod­ucts with long shelf lives, like table olives, olive oil, and dried figs and, there­fore, are highly suit­able for long-dis­tance trade and tax­a­tion, lead­ing even­tu­ally to the accu­mu­la­tion of wealth and a more com­plex social-eco­nom­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion,” Langgout said.

Even though ear­lier stud­ies con­ducted in adja­cent areas of the region have shown the exis­tence of ancient olive mills at the time, researchers can not tell if any olive presses were present in Tel Tsaf.

While olive oil pro­duc­tion would have been pos­si­ble in Tel Tsaf then, there is no cer­tainty nor any hint on how the prod­uct would have been stored.

“We have no evi­dence at the Tel Tsaf site of olive oil pro­duc­tion,” Langgout said, not­ing that arche­ol­o­gists did not find olive waste or olive oil presses at the time.

• Scientific Results