The mystery of a series of stone circles containing thousands of olive pits, found just off Israel’s northern coast a decade ago, has been solved. Archaeologists have concluded they were apparently facilities for pickling olives many years ago – the earliest evidence found so far for the production of this food.
The study, published last week, suggests that people only figured out they could eat olives at least 500 years after they learned to squeeze precious oil from the fruit. It also adds to mounting evidence that today’s Israel was the region where farmers first cultivated olives, which later became a staple crop across the Mediterranean.
The site at Hishuley Carmel, just south of the city of Haifa, was exposed in 2011 after a storm washed off layers of sand that had covered it for millennia, explains Prof. Ehud Galili, a marine archaeologist at the University of Haifa who led the team.
At Hishuley Carmel, Galili and colleagues found an elliptical structure made with a dozen upright stones that were just barely peeking above the water surface a few meters off the beach. Further investigation uncovered a second stone circle and possible remains of a third. The inside of the structures had been paved and was filled with thousands of olive pits, covered with a thin layer of clay and stones. Other installations, possibly wells or storage pits, were found nearby, but no signs of permanent habitation were uncovered, suggesting that Hishuley Carmel was mainly used as an industrial production site of sorts.
The olive pits from Hishuley Carmel were mostly whole and not fragmented, and some even had traces of fruit pulp attached to the stone, says Dafna Langgut, head of the archaeobotanical lab at Tel Aviv University and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. No traces of gefet or remains of tools that could have been used in the pressing of olives were found. This suggests that what was being made in those stone circles was table olives that were being pickled by using sea water or dry salt, Langgut says.
If this theory is correct, the stone circles at Hishuley Carmel would be the earliest evidence for the production of olives for consumption, the researchers say. So far, knowledge of ancient pickling techniques came to us not from the archaeological record but from Classical-period historians in the mid first millennium – Thousands of years after the time of Hishuley Carmel.
