Pr. Paul Halstead, “The importance of olive growing and oil exports in Archaic-Classical Athens"

Abstract: Scholars have long argued about how ‘primitive’ or ‘modern’ was the ancient Greek economy. In this context, arguments over the scale of olive growing in Archaic-Classical southern Greece and of oil exports therefrom assume broad importance for our understanding of early polis societies. A law attributed to Solon of Athens has been interpreted as indicating large-scale olive growing in Attica and state encouragement of the export of oil, while distinctive and widely distributed ceramic vessels for transporting liquids have been cited in support of large-volume trade in oil and wine. Conversely, the scarcity of stone pressing equipment suggests production of oil in Archaic-Classical Greece on only a modest scale. In this presentation, consideration of the oral testimonies of elderly ‘traditional’ farmers (‘citizen scientists’) in Greece, backed up by field observation of living trees and available information from archives, will be argued to support olive growing and hence oil export in Archaic-Classical Greece on only a small scale.

Bio: Paul Halstead is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, where he taught from 1984 to 2020 in the recently closed Dept of Archaeology. He was a student at the BSA in Athens from 1974 to 1977 and has taken part in excavations, surface surveys and post-excavation studies from western Macedonia and Epirus to eastern Crete and Rhodes as a member of archaeological projects sponsored by the BSA, ASCSA, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Athens and Greek Ministry of Culture. His research has focused on Aegean prehistory and ancient Mediterranean farming, drawing particularly on first-hand analysis of zooarchaeological assemblages from Greece and, increasingly in recent years, on oral-historical/ ethnoarchaeological studies of traditional cultivation and herding in Spain, southern France, Italy, Cyprus and, especially, Greece.