Before Civilization by Lord Colin Renfrew

Author:Lord Colin Renfrew [Renfrew, Lord Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, General, Architecture, Prehistoric
ISBN: 9781446466964
Google: QkdHJSmJ2fwC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-03-31T23:56:06.097262+00:00

THE TEMPLE BUILDERS

The temples are so large, and involved so much labour, that they cannot have been the work of small local groups of only fifty or so people, as we have argued for the megalithic tombs of Atlantic Europe. Some new thinking is needed here, about the society of the temple builders.

The material culture of these people is now well documented, through the work of Evans, who first related the temples securely to the other archaeological finds, and subsequently of Trump. It is now possible to trace the development of the culture from the first settlement in Malta around 5000 B.C. in calendar years. The first farmers had a simple agricultural economy, no doubt like that elsewhere in the west Mediterranean, with wheat and barley, sheep, goats and cattle. Their tools were of stone and bone.

The surprising thing is that the material equipment of the temple builders was not so very different from that of the first settlers. Their pottery was well fired and decorated with incisions. They obtained hard greenstone from Sicily for their handsome little axes and chisels. (Already the first farmers had travelled as far to obtain obsidian, a volcanic glass not locally available, and easily worked by chipping in the same manner as flint.) They made personal ornaments and pendants of stone and shell, and figurines of clay and statuettes of stone.

Almost nothing is known of their settlements. Dr David Trump found some huts while excavating the small temple at Skorba, and it seems that private building was often of clay rather than stone, and has not been well preserved. We can, nonetheless, be fairly confident that the ‘megalithic’ temples of Malta are quite unconnected with the tombs of western Europe. Beyond the use of large stones, already available in convenient rectangular blocks, they have nothing in common. And the material culture of their builders betrays no contact.

None of this gives us any clue as to how or why the temples came to be built. Their concentration in so small an island – for there are at least sixteen of them – is as remarkable as ever. Trump’s excavations did hint, however, at a long evolution. For in levels dating back almost to 4000 B.C. he found clay figurines very possibly ancestral to those dated 1500 years later. And in the same levels, a room which he called a ‘shrine’ suggests that functions later served by the temples were already emerging.

In such a quandary, we must turn again to the distribution of the monuments to see if the temples are spaced in such a way, in relation to arable land, as to be assignable to territories, as we have suggested for the tombs of Arran and Rousay. Here the really big temples, with courts measuring more than fifteen metres from apse to apse, must be distinguished from the several smaller ones. There are a dozen of these, generally of simple trefoil shape, as well as several other uncertain sites with large stones, some of which were possibly also small temples.

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