Palynology of some archaeological deposits from tas-Silġ

Abstract

The Maltese Islands lie in an area of strong Mediterranean climate, so that deposits suitable for the preservation of pollen, such as peat bogs, have never formed. The soils of the islands are alkaline and the seasonal wetting and drying is not conducive to the preservation of pollen. Mollusc shells do survive well in Maltese soils and have provided an important environmental sequence at the Brochtorff Circle at Xagħra on Gozo, and another at Tas-Silġ, but resolution of these studies is limited by the extreme environmental elasticity of the Maltese land-snail fauna. Until recently, therefore, apart from occasional archaeological pollen analyses,there was very limited understanding of Maltese vegetation history. The coastal marine deposits have recently yielded pollen, but the deposits are discontinuous and often poorly dated. In essence, the marine sequences show rapid clearance of what appears to have been pine-cupressaceae woodland some time before 7000 years ago and then a relatively unchanging open landscape with steppic vegetation and cereal cultivation through to the present day. The dating of the marine deposits is, however, rarely exact enough to he able to reliably relate events in the pollen diagrams to Maltese cultural phases. There is, therefore, a need for more chronologically-controlled palynological work, in close proximity to sites of human activity, so that a well-resolved history of human-landscape interaction may be established. This chapter describes and interprets the palynology of selected contexts at Tas-Silġ, as a step towards this aim.