The archaeology of olive oil: excavating an olive oil “factory” in Jordan in the 3rd millennium BC

Lecture by James Fraser, Director, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.

Abstract

"The Early Bronze IV period (2600–2000 BCE) in the southern Levant has long been characterised as a rural interlude between two phases of urban life – a time when populations dispersed into villages, and the complexity of earlier city-based economies went into abeyance. This paper challenges that reading.

Drawing on British Museum excavations at the enclosure site of Khirbet Ghozlan in the Jordan Rift Valley escarpment, it proposes that a cluster of small, well-defended hilltop sites functioned as specialised processing and storage centres for high-value tree crops, particularly olive oil. Located on well-drained slopes better suited to horticulture rather than the flood-prone valley floor, these sites represent deliberate economic adaptation rather than retreat, suggesting that horticultural specialisation and the production of storable, cash-crop commodities sustained a form of economic complexity whose resilience may have provided the foundation for the urban revival that followed.

The paper also presents a new suite of radiocarbon dates from Khirbet Ghozlan with significant implications for the established chronology of urban collapse and regeneration in the southern Levant. These dates invite reconsideration of the tempo and character of change within the traditional EB II–III–IV periodisation, and of the processes underlying the emergence of the early 2nd millennium BCE city-state system.

For further details, please get in touch with Seraina Nett