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10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 11 APRIL 2021 OPINION Raphael Vassallo A 'monstrosity' of gigantic proportions BACK in my early University days – in other words, around 25-30 years ago – I remember attending a particular lecture by the late Rev. Prof. Peter Ser- racino Inglott. Naturally, that doesn't mean I also remember what that lec- ture was supposed to be about. As can be confirmed by anyone else who had the privilege of being taught by Fr Peter… he had this tendency to keep drift- ing ever farther from the topic at hand: only to eventually lose sight of it altogether, and get lost in an ocean of his own di- gressions… Sounds familiar, huh? Well, now you know where I picked up the habit myself. In any case: on this occasion, Fr Peter's me- anderings took us to Neolithic Malta... and the megalithic tem- ple culture which flourished here between three and five thousand years ago. Or at least, that was the re- ceived wisdom at the time. As usual, Fr Peter had a slightly different take on the matter: but whether it was his own pet theory, or someone else's that simply appealed to his intel- lectual imagination – possibly even to his religious convic- tions, as a Catholic priest – I cannot rightly say. But in that lecture, Fr Peter explored the possibility that the people who built those tem- ples may not have actually lived here at all. Pointing towards the lack of evidence for habitation sites (more of which in a sec) he portrayed Neolithic Malta, not as the seat of a permanent, sus- tainable human population… but as the Stone Age equivalent of Mecca's Kaaba: a sort of 'Ho- ly Island', slap-bang in the mid- dle of the Mediterranean Sea – and thus, quite literally, at the very epicentre of the Ancient Cosmos - whose temples served as pilgrimage sites for devotees from all over the known world... Now: to be fair to Fr Peter, I only remember him putting that hypothesis forward as a suggestion. He certainly didn't declare his own personal con- viction in the matter: there was, after all, no real evidence to support the theory, at the time; and Fr Peter himself – for all his philosophical musings and elaborate digressions – was ul- timately a scientifically-minded man. But… there was certainly not enough evidence to disprove it, either. Truth be told, we knew so very little about Malta's tem- ple-building culture, back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, that an- yone's guess was almost literally as good as anyone else's. For instance: we didn't even know (and still don't, to this day) where those people actual- ly lived. And I don't just mean the precise location of their set- tlements or villages; but what sort of dwellings they would even have called 'home'. And this, on its own, is enough to fully justify Fr Peter's (and, I freely confess, my own) evident fascination with that 'Holy Is- land' hypothesis, all those years ago. Not only did it seem to mi- raculously 'fill in all the blanks' in our collective knowledge: but the image itself is (let's face it) immensely powerful and evoca- tive in its own right. Honestly though: who wouldn't experience just a ti- ny thrill of excitement, to sud- denly discover that their own homeland – 'boring old Malta', which in the 1980s felt like 'the farthest planet from the centre of the Galaxy' – was in reality some kind of primordial 'Ter- ra Sancta': at the height of its power, possibly the single most important locus in the whole Universe…? Looking back, it is hardly sur- prising that it remains the only one of Fr Peter's many digres- sions that I still distinctly re- member, all these years later. For apart from appealing so strongly to my own imagina- tion… it also brought home, in one staggering moment, the sheer extent of how little we actually know about this myste- rious, vanished prehistoric cul- ture of ours. Please note: 'of ours'. Not some remote, otherworldly cul- ture, brought into our homes by David Attenborough documen- taries; but something unique that existed right here, on our own soil; and in a sense, still ex- ists there today… possibly lying merely inches away from dis- covery, in the sub-soil beneath our own two feet. And this brings me to why this memory was so forcefully jogged this week. As you may have already surmised, even from international press re- ports: there is now a develop- ment application for '31 apart- ments and 20 garages', almost literally a stone's throw from the perimeter of the Ġgantija Temples in Xaghra, Gozo. That is to say, slap-bang in the middle of what can only be described as an archaeological goldmine: the fields surround- ing one of the most impressive of those mysterious monu- ments, bequeathed to us by that even more mysterious vanished culture… and which we already know to be immensely rich in as-yet undiscovered informa- tion about the same period. How do we know this? Well… partly for the same reason that the Ġgantija threat ended up on The UK Times in the first place. That article featured quotes by archaeologists Steve Stoddart and Caroline Malone: both of whom worked extensively on that site, and others in Malta and Gozo, ever since the 1980s. Stoddart, for instance, ar- gues that: "such a development would most likely result in the loss of invaluable archaeologi- cal information […] we've seen incredible deposits lying just under the ground. The whole plateau is rich with such mate- rial and should be protected." Malones adds that: "Surveys have repeatedly demonstrated pottery and evidence of settle- ments in every field of what is a monumental complex. The whole landscape is interlinked and it's one of the most major and best-preserved finds in the Mediterranean…" Both those scientists also worked on the more recent FRAGSUS project, alongside a team of local and international archaeologists. And thanks to that project, we can now con- firm that the Maltese islands were indeed permanently and continually occupied, by at least one settled community, throughout the temple-build- ing period. We also have a much clearer picture of 'how' – if not precise- ly 'where' – they lived. Studies of soil and pollen samples (tak- en, please note, from the fields surrounding temple-sites) con- firm that those people were in fact farmers: they planted and harvested grain; they bred live- stock including goats, cattle and pigs… and through comparative DNA studies on bones retrieved from burial-sites, we even know more or less exactly what they ate on a daily basis. And that's just scratching the surface of the wealth of new in- formation, provided by this and other studies, that was quite simply unavailable to Fr Peter Seraccino Inglott – or anyone else, for that matter – 25 years ago, or more. And while I ad- mit that it pained me slightly, to have to finally let go of such a forceful, appealing theory… the fact remains that this new knowledge is also infinitely more exciting, because it really does 'fill in those gaps' in our collective consciousness. If anything: a greater, more detailed understanding of who actually built those megalithic marvels, would only contribute to the undeniable sense of won- der they still provoke among the thousands of visitors – or 'pilgrims' – to this very day. And nearly all this newfound knowledge comes to us – not from the temples themselves; which have already been ex- haustively researched (though I daresay still retain a few secrets, here and there) – but from the surrounding areas: the buff- er-zone, of what is ultimate- ly supposed to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and which still represents an as-yet un- charted treasure map for possi- ble future excavations. These future excavations, in turn, may have access to more advanced forms of technology … just like today's archaeolo-