Oliva revixit

About this book

"The olives and oil of Athens have been cultivated for millennia by writers, poets, historians and archaeologists, but it is never explained how this stereotype actually worked. Oliva revixit is dedicated to the structures and instruments for the production of Athenian oil, documenting the oileries and the more than 160 components of mills and presses discovered, the latter also used for wine and other oils. This evidence represents a random sample of a total impossible to estimate, and is distributed in time from the sixth and seventh centuries AD up to the nineteenth, with a few earlier examples. The book examines the intermittent sources, written and archaeological, available up to now as well as the much debated evidence for cultivation, production and commerce of oil from the middle of the first millennium BC until the eighteenth century. Over half of this evidence comes from the excavation of the Classical Agora, with 82 structures in 8.3 ha and an average distribution of one find every 1000 m². It was in the ancient buildings of the Agora that the first oileries were built, and where the bulk of the production was concentrated; other oileries were found both inside and outside the city walls, and these, too, date from the sixth/seventh century onwards"--