The social context of Maltese prehistoric art

Abstract

From the outset, the subject of this paper provokes a number of challenging questions: What exactly is a social context? What is the social context of art? And, to what extent does prehistoric art constitute a window through which we in the present can observe or 'read' the past (Hodder 1991)? It has to be said that the answers to these and many related questions have been approached by way of a varied and somewhat turbulent trajectory of theoretical discourse in archaeology over the past four decades, and it has only been with the emergence of post-processual and cognitive approaches of the 1980s and 1990s that progressive insights have been attained. In anthropology, the situation has generally been different and here the art of 'primitive societies' (Forge [ed.] 1973; Fraser 1962; Jopling [ed.] 1971) has been at the forefront of investigations (Layton 1991).