Introduction : the Intellectual and Historical Context

Abstract

The prehistoric society which built the monuments of the Maltese Islands has been established, since the 1970s, as one of the most precocious pre-urban communities of the world. Their stone 'temples' were constructed from the first half of the fourth millennium to their florescence in the mid third millennium BC, at a time when most other late Neolithic communities of Europe lacked the same material evidence for creativity or capacity to mobilize local resources. It is only relatively recently that the pre-eminence of these monuments as the oldest free-standing stone buildings in the world has been challenged by discoveries in northern Mesopotamia (Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe 2007; Schmidt 2006) dating to a much earlier period. In spite of this potential loss of the special status of precedence, these large-scale monuments and their context remain of international importance.