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Title: | The late prehistory of Malta : essays on Borġ in-Nadur and other sites |
Authors: | Tanasi, Davide Vella, Nicholas C. |
Keywords: | Temple period -- Malta Protohistory Antiquities, Prehistoric -- Malta Borġ in-Nadur (Birżebbuġa, Malta) Megalithic temples -- Malta Pottery, Prehistoric -- Malta Excavations (Archaeology) -- Malta Malta -- Antiquities |
Issue Date: | 2015 |
Publisher: | Archaeopress |
Citation: | Tanasi, D., & Vella, N. C. (Eds.). (2015). The late prehistory of Malta: essays on Borġ in-Nadur and other sites. Oxford: Archaeopress. |
Abstract: | One defining episode of Malta’s history is often thought to be that associated with its Temple Period, a millennium of cultural florescence that started about 3600 BC, best remembered for its megalithic buildings, burial complexes, and exceptional art. The tail end of that story remains largely unexplained with environmental factors thought to be as significant as social and symbolic aspects of insularity to explain what appears to be a collapse of the system. The next period in the archipelago’s history – the Bronze Age – is no less dynamic even if it is less well known. Indeed, on the basis of the available archaeological evidence, it has been possible to identify a number of cycles of object/human/knowledge mobility that determined social development in the course of the late third/second millennium BC when the Mediterranean was characterized by marked trans-regional interaction (Broodbank 2013, ch. 8; Tanasi and Vella 2014). But much more remains to be done for a complete picture of the Maltese islands at this time. Although Mediterranean island prehistory has been enriched by the staggering amount of archaeological data that has accumulated over the last decades (cf. Cherry and Leppard 2014, 20), it is surprising how little raw data have, in fact, been published in a comprehensive manner from Malta’s later prehistoric sites over and above some landmark studies (Trump 1961; Evans 1971). This has been rectified over the last few years in a number of ways with the systematic publication of a number of closed contexts (e.g. Għar Mirdum: Tanasi 2014; In-Nuffara: Tanasi 2013; Tas-Silġ: Copat et alii 2013; Sagona forthcoming), in some cases combining empirical approaches and theoretically informed interpretations and perspectives to compare and contrast context-specific dynamics. [Excerpt from the Introduction] |
URI: | https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/88071 |
ISBN: | 9781784911270 |
Appears in Collections: | Scholarly Works - FacArtCA |
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