Distinguishing exploitation, domestication, cultivation and production: the olive in the third millennium Aegean Evi Margaritis ∗ The author shows how better recovery techniques have allowed the early history of the Mediterranean olive to be rewritten. Small scale exploitation is detectable in the Neolithic, and is widespread by the Early Bronze Age. Users appear to be first attracted by the olive wood, the fruit benefitting from the pruning effect as the olive bush becomes a tree. This process eventually results in domestication—but this is an unintended consequence of a production process driven by demand. The story now aligns better with the model put forward in Colin Renfrew’s thesis of 1972. Keywords: Aegean, Bronze Age, third–second millennia BC, archaeobotany, olive, domestication, cultivation, production, civilisation Introduction The beginning of the intensive cultivation of the olive is a cornerstone of the long-standing debate on the economic transformation of the Aegean region in the third millennium BC. According to Colin Renfrew (1972), the intensive cultivation of the vine and the olive made it possible to colonise marginal land, which in turn led to the production of a surplus, population growth, advances in technology and the enlargement of exchange. The olive and vine thus underpin the emergence of the first state-level complex societies of southern Europe. Some subsequent researchers have reinforced Renfrew’s model (Blitzer 1993), but others have taken the opposite view, and questioned the importance of the olive in the Early Bronze Age (Runnels & Hansen 1986).The last major review of these questions, some 15 years ago, was based on a thorough assessment of the organic and material culture evidence; it cast considerable doubt on Renfrew’s hypothesis, concluding that the systematic production of olive oil began in Crete as late as the Second Palace Period (1700–1425 BC) and intensified during the Postpalatial period (1425–1170 BC; Hamilakis 1996). When Renfrew’s hypothesis was first articulated, there was an almost complete absence of archaeobotanical evidence to support it, and subsequent studies largely depended on excavations that lacked a regular and systematic retrieval of archaeobotanical material. This * Wiener Laboratory, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 54 Souidias Street, GR-106 76, Athens, Greece and STARC, Cyprus Institute, 2121 Nicosia, Cyprus (Email: evimargaritis@gmail.com) C  Antiquity Publications Ltd. ANTIQUITY 87 (2013): 746–757 http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/087/ant0870746.htm 746