Archaeologists have documented olive oil production in Italy beginning more than a thousand years before Rome emerged as an imperial power. That revised timeline reorders who developed Mediterranean oil economies first and reshapes Italy’s role long before Roman expansion tied the region together.
The evidence comes from landscapes across the Italian peninsula where olives were already being managed, processed, and stored well before Roman political dominance. Drawing these traces together, Dr. Emlyn Dodd at the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) documented how archaeological and environmental records converge on sustained pre-Roman oil activity.
