Basil Hennessy Memorial Lecture

Six thousand years ago, long before the first cities of the Levant, farmers in the Jordan Valley and its surrounding hills made a remarkable bet on the future: they planted olive trees. A grove takes a decade or more to bear fruit, and committing land and labour to it implies new ideas about property, inheritance and exchange. Together with the first copper metallurgy and richly painted shrines, olive cultivation defines the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500–3800 BCE) of the southern Levant: a “first oil age” whose products may have travelled as far as predynastic Egypt.

Drawing on excavations at Teleilat Ghassul and el-Khawarij in Jordan, we revisit two questions first posed more than fifteen years ago. Did olive oil, as a prestige “cash crop”, help drive social complexity and long-distance trade? And how did communities, not just chiefs and priests, bind themselves together through everyday ritual? New evidence, from ancient olive oil residues and early orchards, to ancient DNA

and a sharper radiocarbon chronology, allows a fresh look. Why did these thriving societies stop at the edge of urbanism, and what does their story tell us about how cities began?

Dr Jaimie Lovell specialises in the late prehistory of the southern Levant. Trained at the University of Sydney and Oxford, she completed her PhD on Sydney University excavations at Teleilat Ghassul in Jordan, and then directed the ARC-funded Wadi Rayyan Archaeological Project, investigating early olive cultivation in the Ajlun highlands. She later worked at the Council for British Research in the Levant’s research Institutes in Amman and Jerusalem. Her publications include a monograph on her Doctoral work at Teleilat Ghassul, and the co-edited volume Culture, Chronology and the Chalcolithic. Jaimie now works in corporate affairs in Sydney, but her fascination with the region’s first farmers, villages and traders endures.