The olive oil trade is likely not as old as archaeologists have long claimed, Discover magazine reports. While archaeologists have long cited the presence of olive oil residue in artifacts such as pottery, a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests that the chemical signatures archaeologists have used to identify olive oil in ancient pottery may be misleading due to the degradation of residue over time, reports Discover .
"There's definitely a sense among archaeologists of wanting to believe that you found olive oil, because it makes a nice story," says researcher Rebecca Gerdes of Cornell University. "The problem is that olive oil overlaps in its composition with a bunch of other plant oils. And if you start to degrade it, then it gets even worse—it starts looking like an animal fat."
Gerdes and her team simulated archaeological conditions by submerging ceramic pellets in olive oil and then burying them in Cypriot and New York soils at different temperatures for up to a year. They found that residues in the alkaline, calcium carbonate-rich soils of Cyprus broke down much more quickly than in the mildly acidic soils of New York, especially at higher temperatures, Popular Science reports.
The findings raise questions about long-held assumptions regarding the scale of olive oil production in ancient Mediterranean societies. The so-called "olive oil hypothesis," which credits large-scale olive oil production with helping to drive the economies of places like Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age, may need to be re-examined. The study concludes that fatty acids used as evidence for olive oil are "consistent but not unique" to it, and that caution should be used when interpreting organic residues from ancient pottery, especially from alkaline soils.
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