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European Journal of Archaeology
Island Identities: Ritual, Travel and The Creation of Difference in Neolithic
Malta
John Robb
European Journal of Archaeology
2001 4: 175
DOI: 10.1177/146195710100400202
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I
SLAND IDENTITIES: RITUAL, TRAVEL AND
THE CREATION OF DIFFERENCE IN
N EOLITHIC
EOLITHIC M ALTA
ALTA
JohnRobb
University of Southampton, UK
Abstract: Malta's Neolithic megalithic `temples', unique in the Mediterranean, provide a striking
challenge to the archaeological imagination. Most explanations have employed a simple function-
alism: the temples resulted from Malta's insularity. Such explanations lack the theoretical grounding
provided by studies of agency and meaning, and they do not suf®ciently account for Malta's pattern
of integration into and differentiation from a central Mediterranean regional culture. I argue that: (a)
contextual evidence suggests that the temples created settings for rites emphasizing local origins
and identity; (b) even in periods of greatest cultural difference, the Maltese had contacts with
nearby societies, and Maltese travellers probably recognized cultural differences in important
ritual practices; and (c) when ritual practitioners began reinterpreting a common heritage of mean-
ings to create the temple rites, they also created a new island identity based on these rites. In effect,
after two millennia of cultural similarity to their neighbours, the Neolithic Maltese created a cultural
island, perhaps in reaction to changes in the constitution of society sweeping Europe in the fourth
millennium BC. The result was an island of cultural difference similar in scale and, perhaps, origin to
many other archaeologically unique settings such as Val Camonica, the Morbihan, Stonehenge, and
Chaco Canyon.
Keywords: Copper Age, cosmology, ethnogenesis, identity, Mediterranean, trade
I NTRODUCTION: WHY IS AN ISLAND?
On 3 June 1780, an Englishman named Patrick Brydone, travelling with two com-
panions, three servants, and several hired boatmen, sailed from Sicily to Malta in
a small, oar-driven boat. Brydone describes the trip:
A little after nine [p.m.] we embarked. The night was delightful; but the wind
had died away about sunset, and we were obliged to ply our oars to get into
the canal of Malta. The coast of Sicily began to recede; and in a short time, we
found ourselves in the ocean. There was a profound silence, except the noise
of the waves breaking on the distant shore, which only served to render it
more solemn. It was a dead calm, and the moon shone bright on the
waters; the waves, from the late storm, were still high; but smooth and
European Journal of Archaeology Vol. 4(2): 175±202
Copyright & 2001 Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) and
the European Association of Archaeologists [1461±9571(200108)4:2;175±202;016493]
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THE CREATION OF DIFFERENCE IN
NTRODUCTION: WHY IS AN ISLAND?
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UROPEAN J OURNAL OF
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RCHAEOLOGY 4(2)
even, and followed each other with a slow and equal pace. ± The scene had
naturally sunk us into meditation; we had remained near an hour without
speaking a word, when our sailors began their midnight hymn to the Virgin.
The music was simple, solemn and melancholy, and in perfect harmony
with the scene and with all our feelings. They beat exact time with their
oars, and observed the harmony and the cadence with the utmost precision.
We listened with in®nite pleasure to this melancholy concert, and felt the
vanity of operas and oratories. There is often a solemnity and a pathetic in
the modulation of these simple productions, that causes a much stronger
effect, than the composition of the greatest masters, assisted by all the boasted
rules of counter-point.
At last they sung us asleep, and we awoke 40 miles distant from Sicily.
We were now in the main ocean, and saw no land but Aetna, which is the per-
petual pole star of these seas. ± We had a ®ne breeze, and about two o'clock
we discovered the island of Malta; and in less than three hours more, we
reached the city of Valletta.
(Brydone 1780, I:216±217)
Brydone's evocative description is interesting for many reasons. It demonstrates
that one can row and sail a small, traditional oar-propelled craft across the 100 km
strait from Sicily to Malta in less than 24 hours, keeping Mount Etna in sight the
entire way ± a point I shall return to later. But it also reminds us of the powerful
uses of both landscape and other peoples in fashioning identities. Here Brydone,
a Protestant, scienti®cally-minded Romantic from industrializing Britain (Ingamells
1997:150), merges his images of nature, in the form of the serene, moonlight-
drenched Mediterranean, and of the traditional past, in the sailor's primitive,
Catholic (and hence to Brydone superstitious), yet deeply moving music, to validate
his particular subjectivity ± to experience a melancholy, transcendental spirituality
which both the surroundings and the sailors help evoke but cannot experience.
Travellers have always used their experience of other places and peoples to de®ne
themselves, and I would argue that this did not begin with recorded history.
But understanding such things in prehistory is not easy. Neolithic Malta, how-
ever, offers us a rare opportunity to see how such a process of prehistoric self-
identi®cation may once have happened.
At the same time, we may also shed light on an enduring archaeological mystery ±
the genesis of the Maltese temples. Two facts about Neolithic Malta have captured ±
or enslaved ± the archaeological imagination: its insularity and its temples. On two
water-locked slivers of land, Neolithic people built dozens of monumental temples
and used them for over a millennium. They were unique: none of their neighbours in
the Neolithic central Mediterranean created such a ¯orid record of ritual. Why did
they alone do this? Archaeologists have come up with varied interpretations,
some quite sophisticated. But when talk returns to causal explanation, virtually
without exception past archaeologists have focused, through relatively simple
functionalism, upon Malta's islandhood. Ultimately, the temples arose because of
Malta's marginal island environment, limited carrying capacity, narrow range of
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OBB : I SLAND IDENTITIES
SLAND IDENTITIES
177
resources, fragile ecosystem, isolation from the main currents of communication,
and so on. In this case, insularity has supplied archaeologists with a master concept
for explanation, much as `the Neolithic' does for explanations of British megaliths.
But islands are more than physical land surrounded by water. Islands are ideas. In
this paper, I shall argue that islands did not fashion Maltese temple society but that,
rather, Maltese temple society created cultural islands in the process of forming a
local identity.
This is thus an essay in the `archaeology of identity'. Without reviewing the
several traditions of studying this complex topic, it is worth noting a few general
points. While many authors doubt whether ®xed ethnic identities existed in pre-
state societies (Emberling 1997; Hegmon 1998), people in all societies express
multiple social identities that can endure over long spans of time. Social identities
are expressed through a variety of material media, and no single medium holds a
special key to social identities. Meanings such as group identity may be created
and expressed through a wide range of products, styles, techniques, attitudes, sym-
bols and dispositions (see Dietler and Herbich 1998; Hegmon 1998). The implication
is that understanding how ancient people created social identities requires not cross-
cultural generalizations so much as careful contextual study of how symbols were
constituted and used in a speci®c situation. In this essay, I focus on ritual symbols
rather than technological choices, style, or other dimensions of material practice.
This is partly because ritual practices often draw upon the cosmological systems
which underpin beliefs about identity and different kinds of people and also
simply because the Neolithic Maltese themselves considered ritual symbols of
central importance. As Evans-Pritchard (1940) said of Nuer cattle, we must rely
upon the natives to tell us what is important.
ALTESE N EOLITHIC TEMPLE SOCIETY: RE-ORIENTING THE QUESTION
EOLITHIC TEMPLE SOCIETY: RE-ORIENTING THE QUESTION
The Maltese archipelago includes Malta and Gozo, comprising a total area of
320 km 2 , and several uninhabited islets (Fig. 1). 1 Both islands are gently sloping
limestone plateaux. Maltese soils are thin, the climate is hot and dry, and the islands
lack useful resources such as good-quality chert, obsidian, ochre, metals and hard
stones for axes. Before humans arrived, the islands were forested, though without
many large land animals. Though the evidence is very slight, the islands probably
became deforested rapidly after Neolithic colonization, as humans depleted old
forests and goat browsing discouraged new growth (see Evans 1971:24; Stoddart
et al. 1993:5).
On current evidence, Malta and Gozo were ®rst colonized by humans around
5500 BC by settlers from Sicily, the nearest land mass (Evans 1959, 1971). For the
next two millennia, Maltese Neolithic cultures remained closely tied to those of
southern Italy and Sicily (Giannitrapani 1997a). The pre-temple Neolithic economy
was based on subsistence horticulture of wheat, barley and pulses, and on herding
of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. Settlements were apparently clusters of small
huts (Trump 1966). The settlers must have come provided with a symbolic culture
and their cosmologies, gender and status ideas, and social institutions would have
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M ALTESE
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178
UROPEAN J OURNAL OF
OURNAL OF A RCHAEOLOGY
RCHAEOLOGY 4(2)
been generically similar to
those found in Sicily and
southern Italy. Picturing the
social geography of the
middle Neolithic central Medi-
terranean, we should probably
see Malta as part of a network
of societies stretching across
southern Italy and Sicily, all
different but all nonetheless
sharing a common basic reper-
tory of symbols and insti-
tutions. The ethnographic
texture, or pattern of variability
within a generally similar
`culture area', may have
resembled some parts of New
Guinea (Feil 1987; Knauft
1993) or the Pueblo cultures
of the American Southwest
(Ortiz 1979).
Around 3600 BC, the Maltese people began to build megalithic `temples'. 2,3,4
About 30 temples are known in Malta and Gozo (Fig. 2), and others may once
have existed. The temples are low, sprawling, stone structures containing between
®ve and twenty rooms, enclosed within a massive retaining wall and presented
with a forecourt for public assembly. They have attracted antiquarian attention
since the eighteenth century for their massive size and the great building efforts
they represent, their dense concentration in two tiny islands, and, above all, for
their uniqueness. None of the contemporaries of the Maltese in the Mediterranean
built megalithic structures of any kind, and there are no clear parallels for the
temples' form and use.
Why did the temples exist? Most archaeologists agree that the temples were used
primarily for ritual (Bonanno 1996). Beyond this, one line of interpretation has
focused upon social relations. Renfrew (1979) viewed the temples as the administra-
tive centres of redistributive chiefdoms. Others (Patton 1996; Stoddart et al. 1993;
Trump 1981) have argued that the temples gave power to a priestly elite (see later
in this article). A second line of interpretation has focused upon the temples' sym-
bolic meaning. Traditionally, they were viewed as loci for `Mother Goddess' worship
(Piggott 1965; see Anati 1985 for critique). After a lull in the 1970s and 1980s,
symbolic interpretation has been stimulated by shifts in archaeological theory and
by recent ®nds (Stoddart et al. 1993). Whittle (1996:321±322) interprets temple
construction as part of a generally increasing commitment to culturally de®ned
`places' in the later Neolithic, perhaps spurred by general regional developments,
and Malone et al. (1997) place the temples within a structuralist-inspired cosmology
of life and death (see later).
Figure 1. Malta in the central Mediterranean. The shaded zones
show the areas within an estimated three days' travel time from
Malta, the Neolithic village of Stentinello near Siracusa, and the
modern town of Enna in central Sicily.
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