ABSTRACT
The Maltese islands (Figures 14.1 and 14.2), located some 85 km south of the island of Sicily in the central Mediterranean, are renowned amongst archaeologists for one of the most marked, distinctive and original developments of artistic creativity in prehistory. During the mid to late fourth and early third millennia BC, a period of consolidation nearly two millennia after the transition to agriculture, there was the long-term maintenance of a particular range of artistic and architectural styles that differed completely from those of neighbouring contemporary societies. The large and fertile neighbour, Sicily, to the north, had no such evident artistic creativity during the same period. In Malta, architecture became monumental in form, employing interconnected lobed apses on an axial frame, forming what are generally accepted as temple structures. Human representation was marked by a characteristic corpulence of the human form. Natural representation included abstract vegetal forms of an almost modern quality. All these elements added up to a highly distinctive repertoire of artistic forms.
