Chapter 6 : cultural landscapes in the changing environments from 6000 to 2000 BC

Abstract

The highly fragmented landscape of the Maltese archipelago presents a range of different environments which evolved along different trajectories and presented different constraints and opportunities to its prehistoric inhabitants. It is remarkable how such a small surface area could show such variation and how each phase of the Neolithic responded to that variation. The FRAGSUS Project has yielded a wealth of new data and insights on a number of sites and landscapes across the archipelago and the opportunity is also taken to publish relevant elements of the survey undertaken in the Cambridge Gozo Project undertaken between 1987 and 1995, whose data were analysed by Sara Boyle (Figs. 6.1 & 6.2) in her doctoral dissertation (Boyle 2013; 2014). The picture that is emerging is one of different sites following life-histories that were often divergent (Volume 2). Comparison of these diverging stories allows some broad generalizations to be put forward about the way the inhabitants appropriated, exploited and ordered the landscape. However, given the diversity of life history, we can envisage that the next generation of scholars will uncover further diversity, perhaps even filling what currently appear to be clear gaps during the fifth millennium bc in the total life histories of the islands. Drawing on the rich detail of environmental and archaeological evidence revealed by the project, this chapter will tentatively outline some of the cultural responses to the changing environment that can be made out so far, after a brief analysis of the formal surface surveys undertaken in the Maltese Islands.