The next extract is an article on Malta’s Prehistory is written by Drs Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart:

20 November 2006 news article

The real prehistoric religion of Malta

Forget the goddess theory, which you hear every tourist guide trying to explain the huge statues at the National Museum of Archaeology or while touring Hagar Qim. That may not have been the original religion of Malta. This was the startling starting point in a lecture "Ritual, Space and Structure in Prehistoric Malta and Gozo: New Observations on Old Matters", given by Dr Caroline Malone, co-director, Xaghra Stone Circle excavation during the recent Heritage Malta international conference held at the Grand Hotel in Gozo.

Dr Malone is Director of studies in archaeology and anthropology and principal research investigator for the Cambridge Templeton Project "Explorations into the conditions of spiritual creativity in prehistoric Malta" at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. The goddess theory may not have been adequately investigated and structured from the many archaeological remains in Malta and Dr Malone dismissed it summarily as a "faulty" theory.

Cult places in general are very special places, for the most part man-made, but possibly also using natural locations. They were mostly enclosed spaces, with controlled access. They were directional – orientated towards the sunrise. The presence of altars and libation holes in the temples in Malta shows this was a highly organised and repetitive religion with ritualistic symbols, participation in offering, with priests and a hierarchy.

The Maltese prehistoric society was a relatively stable, agricultural community, an intense and densely populated island, celebrating cyclical cycles of life. The Maltese prehistoric temples contain elements expected of ritual and cult – a regular layout along axis lines, enclosed spaces and public spaces offering only restricted views from the outside. The axis orientation is linked to a cosmology in an awe-inspiring location.

Hagar Qim is surrounded by performance areas to which everybody had access. There are also oracle holes and even shrines in the outside wall focused on fertility and gender. But there are also barriers and thresholds controlling access to the interior. This is evident from the doorjambs and the holes for barriers. There are also thresholds, steps, in a word, exclusion. 

It is also very significant to study the location of various objects. Libation holes, for instance, are always to be found on the left or in the middle, never on the right. The oracle holes in the restricted areas are always on the right.

Hagar Qim

There are still some unresolved issues: Hagar Qim is a monument in the round, interesting inside, but equally so on the outside. It is also somewhat complicated to decipher: it seems to encourage increased audience participation and the pits for ritual rubbish and the fire pits are on the right.

Tarxien

Tarxien is the only temple where not only do we know what was there but also its exact location, thanks to Temi Zammit’s notes. Access was more controlled here: you did things in a particular pattern.

The broken statues found at Tarxien further confirm this: these seem to have been broken up deliberately: it was the end of an era.

Hal Saflieni & Xaghra

Hal Saflieni and the Xaghra Stone Circle conform to the left-right general orientation but with some differences. They are both enclosed underground sites, reserved for the (bad) dead spirits who must be controlled and kept safe underground.

Dr Stoddart also propounded a theory for the enigmatic double statue found at Xaghra of two seated persons. He suggested that this could symbolise the cycle of life: the figure on the right symbolises birth and that on the left death. There is one curious unexplained detail: broken toes and limbs are very frequent. The Xaghra Circle is a great resource that requires further study, especially medical study. The broken bones and other evidence of stress could possibly point to a state of crisis in society.

Dr Malone obviously based her observations and conclusions on the recent excavations of the Xaghra Circle. Dr Simon Stoddart, the co-director of the Xaghra Stone Circle excavation, submitted a fuller explanation. The full analysis of the circle’s bones has shown there are 220,000 body parts buried there, mostly small bits of bone. The circle itself was a colossal collection of ancestors. Some 800 skulls were found – this gives an inkling of the quantity of the bodies originally buried there. Interestingly, and curiously, the bodies seem to have been moved around. Some bodies remained intact – these were mainly male (thus undermining the goddess theory Dr Stoddart said and concurring with Dr Malone), while other bodies were sectioned off: the skulls collected at the top, the limbs on one side and the other bits on the other side. Some male corpses have older male corpses (ancestors) on top of them. This burial ground thus preserves the memory of male ancestors. In a few cases, where some intact corpses were found, the man seems to have been buried first, followed by a woman.

Ggantija

You enter the Xaghra circle from Ggantija, from east to west. The right has a pit of male ancestors, the left a pit for young women. The purification area is on the left, while the phallic stone is on the right.

Professor Anthony Bonanno also seemed to agree that Malta’s original religion was more an ancestral cult than a mother goddess one.

Ancestor memory provided social cohesion in times of stress.

Like Prof. Bonanno, Professor David Trump said the closest to the Maltese prehistoric temples seem to be the nuraghi, the massive stone monuments in Sardinia.

The location of the prehistoric sites can also shed information about population movements and events in those very distant times.

In a very interesting presentation, Dr Reuben Grima, Senior Curator of world heritage sites at Heritage Malta, plotted the location of the sites against their known history.

The basic feature of the Maltese Islands is that they are a series of river valleys – widien – and also that Malta, as opposed to other islands, is an archipelago.

For these two reasons there seems to have existed a preference to travel by sea from one point of the coast to another, even though vast parts of the Maltese coastline are inaccessible.

There must have been a link between the location of temples and that of people but this is very nuanced and complex.

There does not seem, for instance, to have been a preference in the siting of temples for elevation, nor specifically on slopes. It seems there was a preference for access to the sea and a short distance from the plains. Generally speaking, the direction of the slope seems to have been the most favourable for human settlements, natural gateways between the land and the sea. However, there is a further twist, or complication: sites that started being built at around the same time do not seem to have had the same history. For instance, there is a site at Ghadira which dates roughly from the same time as Ggantija. But the Ghadira one remained small while Ggantija flourished. It seems that only those temples with a prosperous hinterland flourished.

In time, Malta and Gozo came to have one principal site each. Food resources seem to have dwindled and only those communities with an abundance of food grew larger while the other communities died down. If food did not seem to have been shared between the various communities, knowledge and ideas appear to have been shared: there is a homogeneity of cultures evident in the various temples of Malta and Gozo, although there were also some specialised products.

One final point: there does not seem to have been any evidence of a centralised hierarchy.

Source: The Malta Independent Online (18 November 2006)

Drs Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart have been researching Maltese prehistory and the ‘temple’ sites for more than 20 years – both were lecturers at Bristol University when I took my second (1997) of the three degrees I hold, one of them being a higher degree, a MA, one of them a BSc and a part-completed doctorate later from 2000 onwards.

Both gave presentations at the November 2007 Metageum Conference based at Caraffa Stores (‘palace’) on Vittoriosa (Birgu) Waterfront; their presentations were anticipated with interest by several but they never had the coverage/impact as Graham Hancock had at the conference, and it is with some sadness that, as an archaeologist, I have to report that their papers did not receive positive acknowledgement; indeed a small number of people, who considered the Goddess phenomena as sacred above all else found disfavour with their presentations. 

What must be considered, however, is that they interpret the evidence directly from the archaeological record based upon their combined experience over decades.  Their new published work on the Xaghra  and Brocktorff Circle and other temple sites, is scheduled to be published in Spring 2008.

In some research circles “interpretation” is a dirty word; and as a prehistorian, researcher and writer, it is imperative that diplomacy and integrity is at the heart of my research and how it is presented and disseminated to the wider public.

Another extract appears here:

Cambridge conference focuses on prehistoric Malta

Heritage Malta senior curator Reuben Grima and curator Katya Stroud recently presented papers on Malta’s neolithic temples at an international conference held at Magdalen College in Cambridge. Prehistoric Malta was the main focus of the conference, entitled Cult in Context: Comparative Approaches to Prehistoric and Ethnographic Religious Practices. A range of archaeological and anthropological research was presented for discussion, with the aim of promoting the understanding of prehistoric religion and spiritual activity.

The two-day conference was the culmination of a research programme funded by the Cambridge Templeton Consortium (Templeton Foundation) and conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Heritage Malta. During the conference, Reuben Grima spoke about the cultural construction of the landscape in Neolithic Malta and Katya Stroud shed new light on how temple sites have been discovered, explored and managed in historic times.

Other contributors to the conference included David Trump, David Barrowclough, Simon Stoddart, Caroline Malone and Anthony Bonanno – all co-directors of the Xaghra Stone Circle excavations. The five academics also delivered papers during Heritage Malta’s annual international conference that was held in Gozo last November.

Source: The Malta Independent (8 January 2007)

The Death Cults of Prehistoric Malta

“Mysteries of the Ancient Ones”; Special Editions; by Caroline Malone, Anthony Bonanno, Tancred Gouder, Simon Stoddart and David Trump; 10 Page(s)

The Mediterranean region is a fine laboratory for the scientific study of early religions because so many emerged there. Everyone has heard of the mythology of Greece and the cults surrounding the Roman emperors. Yet those were the religions of city-states not far removed from our own modern societies. Far less well known are the religions of the agricultural communities that preceded the advance of Greco-Roman civilization.

In several of the latter, images of corpulent human figures played an important role. Because some of these figures are recognizably female in shape, archaeologists sometimes refer to them as "fat ladies" and associate them with the celebration of fertility, both human and agricultural. On one small group of islands, those of Malta, such figures became the object of an infatuation that was closely linked to the construction of the earliest free-standing public stone buildings in the world.

Author(s)  

David H. Trump

Photography - Daniel Cilia

Date of publication - 2002

Language - English

Abstract

The great temples of Malta lay claim to be the world’s most impressive prehistoric monuments.

They stand out as the single great achievement of the society that created them – a society without cities or written records or any attributes of a civilization other than the monuments themselves. Most of the temples were built before 3,000 BC and perhaps several centuries earlier, and this in itself makes outside inspiration unlikely.

This book presents a superb pictorial record of all the temples, hypogea, and other sites. It describes the wonderful statuettes, pottery, and other material that has been excavated from each site, with more than 300 photographs and illustrations, in full colour.

The book features a detailed visual treatment of 30 key sites with photography, artwork, and maps of Malta and Gozo, showing the exact locations of the prehistoric temples.

Summing Up, and the Way Forward.

Dr. David Trump

In the opening session, a number of distinguished speakers, from President de Marco down, spoke on the Maltese prehistoric heritage and the problems of its conservation.  Then at the end, two specific examples of the threats, the proposed rubbish dump in a quarry close to Mnajdra and the continuing hostility of the hunting lobby in the islands, were vigorously debated.

Between these, and more particularly relevant to the subject of the Conference, a stimulating and wide range of papers were presented.  Some were illustrated by a traditional set of slides, run through a rather temperamental projector, others by several versions of state-of-the-art video equipment, though some of these were not without their glitches too.  Though well behind the times on this one, I personally felt that some of these latter were leaving the archaeological content subservient to exploring the potential of the new techniques.

While naturally concentrating on Malta, papers included to advantage comparative material from as far afield as the Aran Islands and Crete, Hadrian’s Wall and central Mexico.  An equally wide range of topics and general themes was discussed, some old, some new.  There is insufficient space here to comment on all of them, so the brief personal selection in no way reflects on those omitted.

The introductory paper showed that throughout prehistory, the Maltese of the time were in constant contact with Sicily and beyond, so their unique achievement in their temple architecture, statuary and pottery was a matter of choice, not simply the result of isolation.  John Robb took this further by showing that those achievements were all merely extreme versions of much wider regional tendencies, though none the less remarkable for that.

Several speakers (Micallef, Albrecht) discussed the astronomical significance of Mnajdra, making a convincing case for an alignment on the equinoctial sunrise.  But if this was so important to the builders, why was it not applied in other temples?  Possible solstitial sight lines were also discussed, though rather less convincingly, and stellar ones even less so, but all at least deserve exploring.

Isabelle Vella-Gregory considered the issue of gender in the temple period, lamenting the distortions of feminism.  This sparked a lively discussion on the old controversy of the sex of the ‘fat ladies’, a consensus view emerging that this was deliberately ambiguous, for whatever reason.  It was even suggested that the sockets in the necks of some figurines were to take interchangeable heads, male or female as appropriate to immediate circumstance.

General themes emerged (above) during the three-day conference, but they will not be referred to, or elaborated upon here.

Hardly anything can be categorically proved, or disproved, by archaeological means, the best that can be achieved being a balance of probabilities.  This is especially so when it comes to connections between different cultural areas in the past.  That balance can be drastically altered by new discoveries.  For example, a link between the relief spirals in the Tarxien Temples and those on the grave stele at Mycenae were considered highly significant, almost axiomatic, until radiocarbon dates ruled them out completely.  If chronologically acceptable links between adjacent areas like Malta and Sicily have a good chance of significance, those between Malta and the Aegean for example (Blakolmer) are at best more problematic. 

Secondly, although symbolism was very widely employed, and highly important, it is always strictly culturally determined, which makes it extremely difficult to recover from preliterate periods with any confidence.  If red ochre symbolised blood, was it that of battle or menstruation (gender studies again), or more generally of life, or purely cosmetic, without further meaning at all?  Spirals can have one of innumerable meanings, or be purely decorative.  The asterisks on the Tal Qadi ‘astronomical’ slab are generally taken to signify stars, as they would automatically in our society, unless in the form d**n or f**k.  We have no assurance that they have the same, or indeed any, such meaning here.  That may well be so, but only on that balance of probabilities.  For a final example, the most widely recognised symbol worldwide is the arrow, but would a society which had never used any weapon other than the sling, blowpipe or AK47 have the least idea of its meaning?  

Thirdly, leading on from this, we face the constant danger of over interpretation, of reading more into the evidence than was actually intended by those who left it.  Crouched burials are widely referred to as being in the foetal position, and taken to symbolise a return to the womb of Mother Earth, often with the corollary that they there await rebirth.  A simpler answer is that the motivation was strictly practical - a crouched burial requires the digging of a much smaller grave pit.  Here is surely a case for the application of Occam’s ‘razor’, which stated that where alternative explanations are available, the simpler should always be preferred.

With those provisos in mind, how did the conference members view the road ahead?  All were agreed that we need more evidence.  Particularly bewailed was the dearth, or near-absence, of settlement sites contemporary with the temples in Malta.  Their builders and worshippers must have lived somewhere, the evidence from which would enormously improve our chances of reconstructing life at the time.  The recent material from the Xaghra Circle (Stoddart) showed how much more could be learnt from new excavations, though there mainly confined to mortuary practice.

Further analyses are required too, either by techniques already available or by new ones.  Obsidian studies (Tykot) have more to tell us.  A discrepancy is becoming apparent between the accepted chronologies of Sicily (Terranova, Cultraro, Bruno) and Malta (Trump), which radiocarbon analyses from the former island could soon resolve.  Dr Liritzis talked of the exciting possibility of dating temple construction directly, by TL (thermoluminescence).  Dr Mifsud offered fascinating evidence  of thalassaemia from the Bur Mghez skeletons, with implications for genetic affiliation of the Maltese population.  Indeed, molecular biology and DNA analysis could soon produce dramatic solutions to local problems, above all the supposed Tarxien Cemetery invasion, if applied to Maltese material.  A poster on pollen from a core at Marsa is another promising development.  It showed that there was no obvious change in vegetation during the accumulation of 12m of deposit, though we do not yet  have a date for its commencement.  Perhaps Salini, where bottom was not reached, might carry the story back before deforestation, and tell us when, and if, that happened.

Even without such analytical techniques, there is plenty of scope for new insights and interpretations, as several papers here have shown (e.g. Sagona, Bugeja, England).  One not aired at this meeting has been the study of the Ggantija as an engineering exercise by Dr Daniel Clark.  This showed that much less input of effort was required for its construction than is generally believed.  In no way would it have put an intolerable strain on its builders’ resources.

So this conference has broadened all our horizons, and brought together many scholars who would not otherwise have met, to everyone’s mutual advantage.  We are all encouraged to go forth to continue our researches and to relate them more closely to those of our colleagues.  I am delighted to report that it is already apparent that  Malta, Prehistory and Temples will not remain the last word for years to come, as Prof. Bonanno generously suggested at its launch last year.  Maltese archaeology is alive and well, and advancing on many fronts, and, with our grateful thanks to Linda Eneix, this OTS conference is patently doing an excellent job of encouraging it.

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