Dr Caroline Malone, Principal Investigator, from Queens University, Belfast along with a team of archaeologists has been working on the excavation of a rare settlement site at Tac-Cawla, which was first investigated in 1994 and 1995.

Work started on the site at the end of March, and Dr Malone has said that they expect to close the site down early next week.However, before then, Dr Malone said there will be an opportunity for the public to view the work on the excavation site. It will be open to view this Friday and Saturday, the 11th and 12th of July, during their working hours, which are 7.00am-12-00pm and again between 4.00pm and 7.00m on both days. The site will be closed on Sunday.

The team hope that as many people as possible will visit them on the site before it closes.

The Gozo project was started in 1987 to investigate unsolved problems of the fourth and third millennium BC in Malta, the phase of temple construction.

These problems were defined as: the reconstruction of funerary ritual (investigated through excavation at the Brochtorff Circle): the understanding of settlement organisation (investigated through regional field survey and limited excavation) and: the investigation of environmental change (investigated through the study of environmental indicators such as molluscs).

This archaeological project brings together a range of different disciplines to solve an ancient puzzle, one that questions our notions of the “rise and fall of civilisation.”

The project explores how humans in often very restricted places, such as islands, manage to survive and indeed, develop over long periods of time. Human history is punctuated by a succession of changing cultures and distinctive civilisations, each of which emerged specific to a time and place.

The small island archipelago of Malta, one of Europe’s earliest civilisations, as the island laboratory for the investigation of a long-held question of cultural continuity and change in the Neolithic five and half thousand years ago.

The archaeo-environmental project examines the development of this small island archipelago in order to develop models of how societies emerged, expanded, were sustained, and then finally declined, collapsed, or got transformed or replaced. Settled c.5300BC, and probably cleared of most of their pristine vegetation within a few centuries, the Maltese islands supported a thriving, substantially populated and remarkably sophisticated civilisation.

By c.3000 BC, many extraordinary megalithic temples demonstrated the most precocious complex architecture and culture of the period in all Europe.

For 2500 years, this relatively isolated island society maintained a high culture, and their temples appear to have been central to a well organised system of production and redistribution of foods and feasting.

FRAGSUS is a collaborative research programme which is being undertaken by researchers at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology Queen’s University Belfast, the Divisions of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, the Department of Archaeology and Classics, University of Malta, the National Museum of Archaeology (Heritage Malta) and the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, Malta.

The first results of the project will be given at the European Association of Archaeologists 20th Annual Meeting, taking place in Istanbul in September 2014.

Photographs: The team at work on the site, and the principal site at Tac-Cawla

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