Wild olive trees were in Italy during the Pleistocene, more than 11,000 years ago. That much we know from pollen cores pulled from lakes and marine sediments. The trees survived the Last Glacial Maximum in refugia scattered across the peninsula. They were there long before humans paid them much attention.
The question is when people started noticing them.1
Olive charcoal appears in Mesolithic layers dated to around 6600–6100 BCE at Grotta dell’Uzzo in Sicily and at Terragne in Apulia. Pollen from a marine core taken 20 kilometers east of Bari dates to 8500–8000 BCE. More pollen shows up in Sicily between 6700 and 5700 BCE. These are just traces. They tell us the trees were there. They do not tell us what people were doing with them.
The Arene Candide cave in Liguria gives a clearer picture. Olive charcoal from 5740–5590 BCE sits in an assemblage that suggests low-intensity woodland exploitation. Quern stones and sickle blades were also found. The stones could have been used to crush olives. The blades could have harvested them. Or they could have been used for grain. The evidence does not force a conclusion, but it opens the door to the possibility that pre-Neolithic people in Italy were already shaping the landscape of wild olive trees. Pruning branches for fodder. Favoring certain trees for fuel. Collecting wild fruit.
By the Neolithic, the olive shows up more often. Charcoal, pits, pollen. The density increases. But the earliest olive stones in a clear consumption context do not appear until the Middle Neolithic, around 5000–4000 BCE, at Carpignano Salentino in Apulia. That is a funerary context, not a settlement. The olive had symbolic weight by then. It was not just food or fuel.
Most of this early material comes from the south. Calabria, Apulia, Sardinia. Central Italy and the Veneto provide only scattered glimpses. The tree was present, but human interaction with it was uneven, regionally variable, shaped by local habits and environments.
What complicates the story is that wild and domesticated olives are almost indistinguishable in the archaeological record. Morphometric studies focus on changes in the size and shape of olive stones, but the differences are subtle. Genetic and micromorphological methods are improving, but they are not yet reliable enough to settle the question. Proving domestication requires more than the remains of pruned trees. Pruning shows control, but it could just mean people were managing wild stands. Domestication implies selection of desirable specimens and perpetuation of clones through deliberate horticultural technique. That is harder to see.
