Olive Oil Production in the Ottoman-Period Village of ʻEin Shems (Bet Shemesh)

Extensive salvage excavations conducted in the eastern part of Tel Bet Shemesh between 2018 and 2020, east of Highway 38, revealed, among other things, olive presses from Iron Age II and the Byzantine and Ottoman periods.² In addition to them, many stone items were discovered ex situ, which originated in olive presses from different periods (see Gross 2021 for a preliminary review of the excavation results; Ayalon and Tatcher, forthcoming). In this paper we will discuss two presses from the Ottoman period that operated inside caves that we refer to here as ʻthe small caveʼ and ʻthe large caveʼ (Fig.