Hiatus or continuity in prehistoric Malta? from Early Neolithic to Temple Period

Abstract

This paper was inspired by the recent online publication of a 2015 Master's dissertation at a British university in which claims were made that first, the first human settlement on the Maltese islands goes back to 5500 BCE, and second, certain cultural aspects of the temple culture were inherited from the previous Neolithic culture (Dorsey 2015: i, 1-3). The following is a critique of these two claims in light of long-established chronological parameters for Maltese prehistory (Renfrew 1972; 1973: 151-2), and of recent findings resulting from a multidisciplinary research programme concluded in 2018, some results of which have already made it to the public domain (Barratt et al. 2019).