New evidence of beekeeping and beeswax use in ancient Greece is emerging from pottery pulled out of a remote cave on the Greek island of Kythera. A recent study found chemical traces of beeswax baked into broken pottery shards inside the cave, adding to signs that islanders made and used bee products thousands of years before written history.
The find pushes back the timeline for beeswax use on the island and adds new detail to the story of early Greek beekeeping.
The study appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Konstantinos P. Trimmis, of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens and the University of Sydney, led the study.
The cave, called Kataphygadi, sits inside a narrow sinkhole near the top of Mermygkaris mountain, in the center of Kythera. It holds two main chambers linked by a tight passage. Archaeologists first excavated the site in 2011 and recovered more than 1,000 bone fragments and about 2,500 pieces of pottery.
Chemical tests confirm beeswax and beekeeping in ancient Greece
For the new analysis, researchers tested 16 pottery shards and seven teeth pulled from that earlier excavation. They studied fatty residues trapped in the clay, examined the mineral makeup of each vessel under a microscope, and ran isotope tests on the teeth to trace where each person likely grew up.
Four of the pottery pieces, dated to roughly 3,500 years ago, carried a chemical pattern that matched aged beeswax.
The signal included long fatty compounds and waxy esters that form as fresh beeswax breaks down over time. Trimmis said that the pattern likely points to local handling of honey or wax tied to daily life on the island, rather than goods brought in through trade.
Kataphygadi also served as a burial site. Bones found in the cave date back to around 2500 B.C. and continue through the Late Bronze Age, with later use stretching into Classical and Byzantine times.
The beeswax-marked pottery turned up buried near the dead, suggesting the substance carried meaning in funeral rites, not just everyday cooking.
Teeth and pottery point to a local island community
Isotope results from the teeth suggest most of the people buried in the cave grew up locally on Kythera, rather than arriving from Crete or the Greek mainland.
That lines up with the pottery findings, which show islanders kept making their own ceramics with local clay even as Cretan pottery styles spread across the region.
Trimmis said that the results show that small island communities held onto their own customs and craft skills, even while trading with larger, more powerful neighbors throughout the Bronze Age.
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