Temple Landscapes: Fragility, change and resilience of Holocene environments in the Maltese Islands

The FRAGSUS Project, funded by the ERC, investigated environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability in the Maltese Islands during the Holocene period. The first volume of three presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes, combining AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with detailed palynological, molluscan, and geoarchaeological analyses. The project reveals the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system and the adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity in the face of climatic change and soil erosion.

Format: Hardback
Length: 484 pages
Publication date: 31 December 2020
Publisher: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change, and collapse in prehistory, 2013-18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast), delved into the realms of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This inaugural volume of a trilogy presents a comprehensive palaeo-environmental narrative of the early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a rigorous program of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo. Extensive buried deposits, extracted through coring and geoarchaeological study, yielded invaluable and chronologically controlled data, providing a profound new understanding of environmental change in these islands. The study integrated advanced AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with meticulous palynological, molluscan, and geoarchaeological analyses. These methodologies enabled the reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes and the examination of the diverse resources exploited by the islanders between the seventh and second millennia BC.

The interdisciplinary approach, coupled with excavated economic and environmental materials from archaeological sites, allowed Temple landscapes to explore the profound and detrimental impacts inflicted by the initial farming communities on the islands' soil and resources. The project unveiled the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system within the island landscapes, as well as the innovative adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity in the face of climatic change and relentless soil erosion. Neolithic inhabitants clearly possessed a deep understanding of maintaining soil fertility and navigating the inherently unstable and ever-changing landscapes of Malta. In contrast, during the second millennium BC Bronze Age society, the prevailing mindset seemed to be less attuned to these ecological challenges.

Dimension: 280 x 216 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781902937984