© Berthold Werner, CC-BY-SA 3.0.Relief showing goats and rams from one of the temples at Tarzien.
Malta is famous for its ancient megalithic temples, such as
Gjantija and
Hagar Qim. The orthodox view has always been that they are Bronze Age, or slightly earlier. The most recent attempt to date them involves researchers from Queens University Belfast (QUB), Maltese institutions and other universities in the UK under the 'FRAGSUS' project, an EU multi-million pound research collaboration. For example, see the paper 'Island questions: the chronology of the Brochtorff Circle at Xaghra, Gozo ...' by C. Malone
et al. (2019) in the journal
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.Because they are megalithic structures, for which radiocarbon dating is useless, the conventional approach is to date remains found in situ within and near the temples. Of course, this is simply dating the latest occupations of the temples, not necessarily their construction dates. All of the latest work carried out by the FRAGSUS team simply confirms the
conventional view that the earliest settlement on the island began around 5200 BC, with the temples being built over the course of a few thousand years, beginning slightly before 4000 BC.But now we can provide a zodiacal date that shows at least some of the temples were in use before the 8.2 kiloyear event, around 6300 BC. Presumably, then, the islands were depopulated by the 8.2 kiloyear event, which I suspect was another catastrophic encounter with the Taurid meteor stream, that probably also led to the demise of the culture that built the Great Sphinx of Giza. In effect, I suspect there was a well-developed (early Neolithic) Mediterranean culture involving Malta, Egypt, Turkey, the Levant and possibly several other regions, that was largely destroyed by the 8.2 kiloyear event.
Just how advanced this culture was is not clear. Could they have mapped the world? Who knows. Did they cut the giant Baalbek megaliths? Quite possibly. So how does the zodiacal dating of these Maltese temples work? Zodiacal dating is a disruptive 'technology'. It challenges, and overturns, core archaeological assumptions of 'gradualism' and 'cultural evolution', currently believed wholesale by the bulk of the archaeological academic community, which deny the possibility of a widespread ancient culture that recorded the many destructions of their world in terms of great artworks.
Comment: See also: