3 Archaeological Research
3.1 The Prehistory of Malta
The prehistoric society that built the Megalithic Temple monuments of the Maltese Islands has been established as one of the most precocious pre-urban communities of the world (Malone et al., 2009). The earliest evidence for human occupation of the islands goes back to the early Neolithic period, which would now be placed at 5800 to 5500 BC thanks to the dating programme of the FRAGSUS project. This date is also considered the onset of the Pre-Temple period of the Maltese Islands, which lasted until 4100 B.C (Table 3.1).
The Pre-Temple period encapsulated the Għar Dalam, Grey Skorba, Red Skorba phases and the sites of human occupation were established in open areas and caves. The Stone Temples were constructed from the first half of the fourth millennium until their florescence in the mid-third millennium BC (Table 3.1). The Temple Period had a clear but not yet fully explained end at approximately 2500–2400 B.C, which also signified a possible break in the Neolithic sequence of the Maltese Islands. New activity on the islands was reported during the Tarxien Cemetery Phase (2400 B.C.), but there is a trace of continuity (Trump, 2010).
Although these monuments and the culture that erected them have been investigated for decades, there are many aspects of them that are still poorly understood. One of these is the origin of the chert/flint assemblages found in many prehistoric sites on the Maltese Islands. This study will try to investigate the origin of the chert/flint assemblages found in association with the archaeological sites of the: a) Ġgantija (temple site), b) Brochtorff–Xaghra Circle (funerary site), Taċ-Ċawla (settlement site) c), d) Kordin (temple site), e) Skorba (Temple and settlement) and f) Santa Verna (temple site). This chapter will present background information on these sites and their importance in the prehistory of Malta.
Table 3-1: The cultural phases of Prehistoric Malta. Radiocarbon dates are quoted throughout the text as cal BC/AD dates unless otherwise stated.
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3.1.1 Literature Review of the research on the Neolithic Period of Malta
Recent work by the FRAGSUS project shows that the first Neolithic settlement on the Maltese Islands dates to at least 5500 BC and human impact recorded in the pollen record to even earlier in the sixth millennium BC (Farell et al. in press). The famous Stone Temples now appear to be part of the second cycle of human settlement reaching its peak between 3000 and 2350 BC. The remains of these huge constructions were known for millennia but were initially ascribed to incursive groups such as the Phoenicians (Houel 1782-7). The first certain records of prehistoric remains on the Maltese Islands were found in the work of Commendatore G. F. Abela (an official of the Knights of St. John in Malta), which was published in 1647. This was followed by the work of Houel (1782-7), which described some of the chief visible prehistoric remains. The author included detailed engravings of these monuments in the late 18th century and illustrated how these monuments appeared before they were excavated (Evans, 1959; Pecoraino 1989; Freller 2013).
One of the first monuments excavated was the Brochtorff–Xagħra Circle on Gozo, a project carried out by Otto Bayer in 1826. The excavation was conducted in the centre of the monument and revealed the megalithic structure and the burials below ground (Attard Tabone, 1999; Grima, 2004; Malone et al., 2009). Unfortunately, Bayer died without leaving any record of his work and nothing would have been known if it were not for the sketches of Charles de Brocktorff (Grima, 2004). The site was refilled and returned to its previous use as a field (a common practice at the time) and stayed hidden for more than a century. One year later (1827) Bayer was again the first to excavate the famous Ġgantija Temple, an archaeological site very close to the Circle. The decades that followed until the end of the 19th century were thronged with travellers (e.g. Sant Cassia, 1993) examining many Neolithic sites of the Maltese Islands (e.g. Ħaġar Qin, Kordin). Nonetheless, very few of these investigations (e.g Vance, 1842) provided any records or published their findings and actually delayed the investigation into the prehistory of Malta. Therefore, it was no surprise that all the scholars until the 20th century believed that all of these sites were related to the Phoenician occupation (of approximately 1000 B.C.).
Thankfully the turn of the century initiated an increasing interest in Mediterranean prehistory and subsequently of the Maltese. During the first decades, a number of sites (e.g. Ħaġar Qim, Hypogeum) were excavated and investigated further. In 1901, the German scholar A. Mayr published his work with
37 the title: “Die vorgeschichtlichen Denkmäler von Malta". It was the first comprehensive work on the known prehistoric buildings and attempted to evaluate the content and significance of these monuments in the prehistory of the Mediterranean (Evans, 1959). In 1910 the work on the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, under the supervision of Magri and then Zammit, was published (Zammit, 1910) and provided a full description of the monument along with a plan of the temple/structure. The Hypogeum was initially found in 1902 and must be considered one of the most important discoveries of the Maltese prehistory. A major breakthrough was the work of Zammit initially with Ashby at Santa Verna and subsequently at Tarxien, establishing for the first time the importance of the Late Neolithic Period of Malta (Ashby et al., 1913; 1916; Zammit, 1915-1916). Special recognition must be given to Margaret Murray (1923–29), whose work remains, to date, the most easily quantifiable prehistoric excavations from the Maltese Islands. In addition, the work of Luigi Ugolini from 1924 to 1935 is considered an early systematic documentation of the prehistoric holdings in the archaeological museum in Malta and an architectural survey of monuments (Evans 1971). However, his unexpected death in 1936 and WWII led his archive to be forgotten for almost a century until it was finally rediscovered in 2000 (Pessina et al., 2005).
With the exception of the above, the two world wars did not have a significantly negative effect on the work carried out in Malta. Nevertheless, it was not before 1950 that the circumstances were right for advancement on the interpretation of prehistory. It was then that Professor John Evans was commissioned to produce a survey investigating the prehistory of the Maltese Islands, which proved to be a turning point in our understanding of these megalithic monuments. Indeed, in 1953 his major publication "The Prehistoric Culture–Sequence in the Maltese Archipelago" provided the foundation of all subsequent work on Maltese prehistory. Evans was fortunate enough to have Dr David Trump as the curator of the National and Archaeological Museum during the period 1958–63 and his work during the same period helped Evans’ research greatly (1959; 1971). Indeed, Trump’s excavations at Skorba, Baħrija, Ta’ Ħaġrat, Kordin III (Malta) and Santa Verna (Gozo) in the 1960s provided the missing chronological links in the developing prehistoric sequence (Evans 1971). Trump was the first to employ the newly introduced radiocarbon dating technique on the Maltese islands, which provided scientific evidence for the exact dates of these prehistoric sites and it is still considered a major breakthrough in the archaeological research of the Maltese Islands (Malone et al., 2009; Renfrew, 1973). Trump's research is regarded as a great contribution to prehistoric Malta and has been presented in numerous publications (e.g. 1961a, b; 1966; 2002; 2015).
The next important discovery came from the investigation of the Brochtorff Xagħra Circle (1987–
1994), where a second hypogeum was conclusively found. The results of this excavation have been presented in the book of Malone et al. (2009) and it has been considered a counterbalance to the loss of data from Ħal Saflieni (Stoddart 1999; Trump, 2002; Sagona, 2015). The great importance of this excavation could be understood by the fact that it presented the first major analysis of human remains
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from a mass burial ground of the prehistoric period (Sagona, 2015). Furthermore, the Skorba and Brochtorff Xagħra Circle excavations helped systematize the ceramic sequence of Maltese prehistory and the Skorba excavation gave Renfrew (1973) the opportunity to place these results in a broader European context (Sagona, 2015). In his work, he stressed the implications of calibrated dates, which suggested that the Maltese Stone Temples were some of the oldest free-standing monumental constructions in the world (Renfrew 1973; 1986a).
The FRAGSUS project (with which this dissertation is associated) has succeeded in taking the study of the patterns of human settlement in the Maltese Islands much further. Pollen evidence now suggests that humans had an impact on the islands as early as the beginning of the sixth millennium and that stable settlement was present from at least the middle of the same millennium. Furthermore, the application of hundreds of AMS radiocarbon dates has detected a possible absence of settlement and decline in agricultural activities between c. 4800 and 4100 BC, suggesting that the phase of settlement culminating in the Stone Temples may have represented a new Neolithic population. Most importantly, the recent excavations of Ġgantija, Santa Verna, Skorba and Kordin have been executed with greater rigour, recovering the archaeological samples of lithics analysed in this thesis, together with a more detailed analysis of materials from the earlier excavations at the Brochtorff Xagħra Circle.
The research undertaken so far in the Maltese Islands has answered many questions about life and death rituals, the location and function of settlements and the degree of vegetational cover and erosion. An enduring question in much Maltese research is the degree of connectivity with neighbouring regions. The study of the Brochtorff Xaghra Circle added details to the study of exotic greenstones and the FRAGSUS project has added the study of isotopes and DNA to human remains. In this work, there has been no systematic sourcing of the lithic remains and this dissertation seeks to achieve this end from a strongly geological perspective.
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