Description
More than 30 years after the game-changing early neolithic Ghar Dalam finds made at Taċ-Ċawla, Gozo, this comprehensive book highlights the leading role of Gozo during the first immigrations, about 5800BC, a date already established by Veronica Veen and Adrian van der Blom in 1993.
The island truly must have been a multi-cultural crossroads, with settlers navigating to and fro from a diversity of cultural spheres: the south and east coasts of Sicily, the South of Italy and even the Adriatic. All this is based on fieldwork by Dr. van der Blom. A new periodization for Malta’s long-lasting early Neolithic is proposed, also involving the Skorba phase.
In the first book on the subject (1992), revolving around taċ-Ċawla, the authors refuted the stubborn prejudices that survive even to date: their “accidental” arrival “on rafts”, “living in caves”, and being very “primative”.
On the contrary, on their beautiful and sophisticated pottery they expressed their holistic worldview about how nature works, unriddled by dra. Veronica Veen by symbolic anthropological means; no superfluous message conyeded to us in our present ecological crisis. Besides, this pictorial language represents no less than the first – women’s – art in Malta.
