The ‘Dolmens’ of Malta and the Origins of the Tarxien Cemetery Culture

The material from the cremation cemetery which was found by Sir T. Zammit in 1915 stratified above the earlier remains in the Tarxien temples raises some of the most fascinating and intricate problems in the whole of Maltese prehistory. Who were these bizarre people, whence did they come to Malta and at what date ? The excavator, basing himself on the ‘Copper Age’ appearance of the culture and the various parallels with early Trojan, Cycladic and Cypriote materials to be observed in it, suggested that their arrival in Malta should be placed somewhere about 2000 B.C. and that they had probably come from the East. Zammit's parallels were, as I hope to show here, basically correct as far as they went, but his chronological inference was invalid because he did not allow sufficient time for the relatively slow cultural movements which brought material of this type from the Eastern to the Central Mediterranean. This was largely due to a failure to trace the intermediate steps in detail, a failure which has not subsequently been made good by any other student. Professor Childe has compared the metal types of the Tarxien Cemetery with Danubian and Sardinian ones, and the two-storied urns with Italian Iron Age types, but admitted that at that time the date of the culture might by reasonably placed anywhere between about 1800 and 800 B.C. The dating question is of great importance, since, if the Tarxien Cemetery can be confidently dated to some period in the second millennium B.C., it provides us with the first known examples of inurned cremation in the Western Mediterranean.