Abstract
Olea europaea (olive) is a typical fruit tree of the Mediterranean basin where it has been widely cultivated for millennia. In the Aegean, the growing of olives is known since the Neolithic period, and it has been suggested that their cultivation increased during the 1st millennium bce. The olive and its by-products have played dynamic roles in the economies of the regions in which it was grown. The finding of charred olive stones at the site of Sikyon in the northeastern Peloponnese, Greece, reflects the role of olives in this region during the second half of the 1st millennium bce until the beginning of the 1st millennium ce. The results of geometric morphometric analysis of some complete olive stones found in various archaeological contexts at Sikyon provide information on the state of olive cultivation and the richness of the various olive varieties grown there.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the directors of both projects in Sikyon, Silke Müth-Frederiksen, Konstantinos Kissas and Yiannis Lolos for allowing us to study the material analysed. The study of the material from the excavations on the plain of Sikyon is part of K. Tsirtsi’s doctoral thesis entitled Agricultural and domestic practices in Classical/ early Hellenistic Sikyon: Evidence from the Archaeobotanical remains and utilitarian pots and is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. We would also like to thank D. Katsagounos for assisting us with the generation of the digital images of the olive stones, as part of his internship at the Cyprus Institute. Last but not least, we are grateful to the European Commission H2020 Twinning project: ‘Promoting Archaeological Science in the eastern Mediterranean’ (Promised, Grant No 811068), which facilitated the visit to and work at the Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Monpellier, France.
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Tsirtsi, K., Pagnoux, C., Bonhomme, V. et al. Development of olive cultivation at the site of Sikyon, Greece: evidence from the charred olive remains from the late Classical/early Hellenistic to the Roman period. Veget Hist Archaeobot 33, 343–351 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-023-00943-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-023-00943-z