Island Archaeology of Malta - Megalithic Temples and Tombs
In the suburban outskirts of Valletta, the capital of Malta, lie two of the most impressive prehistoric monuments in Europe. They are Taxien, a set of three/four megalthic temples, and Hal Saflieni, a rock-cut hypogeum, or underground burial place. These Maltese temples are all the more remarkable in being without parallel in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Malta is one of the smallest Meriterranean islands, part of a group along with neighboring Gozo and tiny Comino. Their combined land area is only 120 square miles. And they are not particularly fertile islands. Today they are largely bare of tree cover, and soil erosion has exposed expanses of the underlaying rock in many places.Yet the maltese islands were still workable by early farmers, who settled and grew crops there from around 5000 B.C. These farmers were the first people to colonize Malta. They had come from Sicily, nearest landfall, lying some 50 miles north of Gozo. They made beautiful pottery and had imported good such as volcanic glass used for cutting tools, red ochre for coloring, and greenstone for polishing axes. But you could not find these imports in numerous quantities.
Maltese islands became increasingly isolated as the centuries passed, and it seems that this isolation stimulated the development of the Maltese temple-building tradition. Isolation, then, is a key feature of Maltese prehistory. The Islands have excellent natural harbors. The early communities of Malta seem to have become inward-looking, trapped within the limited horizons and resources of their home.
The people of Malta and Gozo left us with a remarkable reminder of what early Neolithic life was like and in the end what we can not avoid if we over exploit our world. They leave us with two legacies. They open a window into what is Neolithic ritual life and we can see how they viewed death and the relationship of the living with the dead - their ancestors. The megalithic temples and tombs from Malta and Gozo tell us how other sites like these in Europe may have functioned.
The figurines that are found here remind us of a deeper legacy - that of the Venus figurines that take us deep into prehistory more than 20,000 years ago. They take us to the legacy of Ishtar or Innana and the concept of the mother goddess that we find in early Neolithic villages of the Anatolia plane and of Mesopotamia. The remains at Malta and Gozo tell us about the long history of female goddesses. Yet the designs reflect a connection with later sites such as Newgrange and other megalithic sites in England. The reflect not only a connection with the past but also with what will follow.