Hishuley Carmel: evidence for table olives

The explanations distinguish finds, interpretations and open questions. Sources appear at the end of the page.

What the article describes

According to the article by E. Galili and colleagues (Scientific Reports, 2021), Hishuley Carmel is an inundated, "mid-7th millennium BP" site on the Carmel coast. It has two structures: Structure A, "a small elliptical structure constructed of upright stone slabs and stone pavement", 2.55 m long and 1.5 m wide, of 13 upright stones, and Structure B, of seven upright stones. Four additional round installations, up to 1.5 m in diameter and made of undressed stones, were identified about 80 m offshore at 3 m depth. Source 1.

The date and the period

Olive pits from the two structures were radiocarbon dated, and the article gives the site "6,656-6,450 BP", "i.e., the Middle Chalcolithic period"; its summary has "~6,600 BP". The text read does not say whether the dates are calibrated, and this page does not convert them to BCE. The name "Middle Chalcolithic" is mentioned on this site without a range of its own and has no separate page; the article is therefore placed on the Levant Chalcolithic page by the period name in the source, not by a conversion of the date. Source 1.

Intact and fragmented pits

The sample of 3,113 olive pits from Hishuley Carmel comprised 48.0% intact and 52.0% fragmented pits; at "the nearby and slightly earlier" Kfar Samir, only 15.6% of 5,106 pits were intact. According to the authors, "whole olive pits are not considered waste of oil extraction", and they also compared pit size, pollen and the architecture of the installations at the two sites. Their conclusion: olive oil was extracted at Kfar Samir, while at Hishuley Carmel "large quantities of table olives" were prepared, pickled or dry-salted. Source 1.

Sea water, salt and an experiment

According to the authors, this process "was most probably facilitated" by the site's proximity to the Mediterranean, a source of the sea water and salt "required for debittering/pickling/salting the fruit, as experimentally demonstrated in this study". Fermentation experiments with sea water and sea salt showed that olives "can successfully be fermented using sea water", and a pilot dry-salting experiment was carried out on 800 g of naturally growing olives. In their words, the stone-built installations "would have been ideal for dry-salting". The experiments show that the process is possible; they do not show what was actually done at the site. Source 1.

"Earliest": a claim and its limits

The authors present the find as "the earliest evidence for large-scale table olive production" and the olives as "the oldest reported to date". That is their claim, valid only for what had been reported by 2021. Their conclusion about the order of uses is also cautious and regional: in this region, olive oil production "may have predated" table olive preparation. As for the source of the fruit, they write that the olives seem to have been collected from wild trees, but that early cultivated trees cannot be ruled out. Source 1.

Scope of reading: the Scientific Reports article was read on the publisher's site on 24 October 2026, in the parts needed for the facts here: abstract, results, discussion and summary. The tables, supplementary data and details of the radiocarbon dates were not read, so this page gives no individual dates, pit measurements or pollen data.