Reuben Grima

Improving accessibility to Cultural Heritage (CH) is an increasingly urgent challenge today. It is not only a matter of physical inaccessibility but also temporal, considering that part of CH now lost. Fortunately, the most modern technological tools are helping to break down both space and time barriers. In facts, recent advances in representation, 3D modelling and survey methodologies opened new scenarios for valorization and conservation of CH. In particular, the improvement of quality in resolution and sensor sensitivity of cameras allowed to achieve the right level of 3D reconstruction through digital photogrammetry procedures. In the same field, terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) allowed acquiring dense point clouds of complex environments with a millimetric level of accuracy. At the same time, the application of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies is an excellent solution for improving the accessibility to monuments, museums and archaeological sites. It is possible to share new levels of information about CH, in space and time, for touristic, managerial and scientific aims. This work is focused on the virtualization of CH, considering the study case of the fountain of Wignacourt, today present in St. Philip Garden in Floriana and initially located in Valletta (Malta). The application presented allows the virtual fruition of the monument placed in its original location, St. George Square. A simplified plant of the square will enable tourists to make a temporal journey in the past with their mobile device. The work is part of the Interreg Italia-Malta European project named I-Access, dedicated to the improvement of CH accessibility. It focuses the attention to the experimentation of new specific procedures in Geomatics necessary to solve big data issues of complex environment visualization.

The present study seeks to understand the determinants of land agricultural suitability in Malta before heavy mechanization. A GIS-based Logistic Regression model is built on the basis of the data from mid-1800s cadastral maps (cabreo). This is the first time that such data are being used for the purpose of building a predictive model. The maps record the agricultural quality of parcels (ranging from good to lowest), which is represented by different colours. The study treats the agricultural quality as a depended variable with two levels: optimal (corresponding to the good class) vs. non-optimal quality (mediocre, bad, low, and lowest classes). Seventeen predictors are isolated on the basis of literature review and data availability. Logistic Regression is used to isolate the predictors that can be considered determinants of the agricultural quality. Our model has an optimal discriminatory power (AUC: 0.92). The positive effect on land agricultural quality of the following predicto...

The purpose of this paper is to review the performance of the protective shelters installed over three archaeological sites in Malta over the past decade, and to draw some key lessons learnt that may be useful to others when considering whether to adopt a similar solution. The conservation threats to the Megalithic Temples of Malta are introduced and defined—these range from material issues (loss of surface) to structural issues (cracking and dislodgement of stones leading to structural instability and collapses). Causes identified specifically included fluctuating environmental conditions: wetting and drying cycles and thermal fluctuations, combined with the salt-laden Mediterranean island environment. The recognition during the late twentieth century of these issues as key factors in the deterioration of these structures, and the strategy that was developed in response, are outlined. A key component of this strategy was the installation of protective shelters over three of the main megalithic sites. The process through which the design requirements for the shelters were defined is reviewed. The performance of the shelters is then examined, through a critical review of unpublished reports and published studies. An evidence-based summary of the beneficial effects of the shelters is provided, and the possibility of any harmful effects discussed. A number of lessons learnt through this process are then identified. One key lesson is that the microenvironment in a newly-sheltered site is at a transitional stage that does not necessarily reflect longer-term trends, which therefore require long-term monitoring to be understood. The choice and number of environmental parameters to be monitored need to be informed by a careful consideration of their sustainability, both in terms of equipment and human resources. Any monitoring programme, however well-designed, needs to be open to re-evaluation and revision where needed. As more experience and data are accumulated from different sheltering projects, it will become more feasible to establish performance indicators in advance of a sheltering intervention, on the basis of which to evaluate its performance. The experience of these projects is then used to inform a checklist of key considerations for anyone considering whether to shelter an archaeological site. The foremost consideration is that every site requires a site-specific strategy tailored to its needs. The decision whether a shelter is desirable, and what its performance requirements should be, may only be taken in the context of such a strategy. This paper should help define the parameters for such a decision to take place.

The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, culture change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18) led by Caroline Malone (Queen’s University Belfast) has focused on the unique Temple Culture of Neolithic Malta, and its antecedents and successors through investigation of archaeological sites and monuments. This, the second volume of three, presents the results of excavations at four temple sites and two settlements, together with analysis of chronology, economy and material culture.

The project focused on the integration of three key strands of Malta's early human history (environmental change, human settlement and population) set against a series of questions that interrogated how human activity impacted on the changing natural environment and resources, which in turn impacted on the Neolithic populations. The evidence from early sites together with the human story preserved in burial remains reveals a dynamic and creative response over millennia. The scenario that emerges implies settlement from at least the mid-sixth millennium bc, with extended breaks in occupation, depopulation and environmental stress coupled with episodes of recolonization in response to changing economic, social and environmental opportunities.

Excavation at the temple site of Santa Verna (Gozo) revealed an occupation earlier than any previously dated site on the islands, whilst geophysical and geoarchaeological study at the nearby temple of Ġgantija revealed a close relationship with a spring, Neolithic soil management, and evidence for domestic and economic activities within the temple area. A targeted excavation at the temple of Skorba (Malta) revisited the chronological questions that were first revealed at the site over 50 years ago, with additional OSL and AMS sampling. The temple site of Kordin III (Malta) was explored to identify the major phases of occupation and to establish the chronology, a century after excavations first revealed the site. Settlement archaeology has long been problematic in Malta, overshadowed by the megalithic temples, but new work at the site of Taċ-Ċawla (Gozo) has gathered significant economic and structural evidence revealing how subsistence strategies supported agricultural communities in early Malta. A study of the second millennium bc Bronze Age site of In-Nuffara (Gozo) likewise has yielded significant economic and chronological information that charts the declining and changing environment of Malta in late prehistory.

Landscapes have been shaped and reshaped by humans to meet the changing needs of shifting subsistence strategies and demographic patterns. In the Mediterranean region, a widespread subsistence strategy that has left a major imprint is pastoralism, often tied with transhumance. Pastoralism and the associated tensions between pastoralists and settled agriculturalists have political and legal dimensions which are sometimes overlooked in mainstream accounts of national “patrimony”. The rapid transformations of subsistence strategies witnessed in the twentieth century have changed pastoral landscapes in diverse ways. This paper focusses on the central Mediterranean archipelago of Malta to explore how the values and management of such landscapes require holistic assessment, taking into account the intangible practices and embedded legal rights and obligations that maintained these systems. While in Malta pastoralism has practically disappeared, its physical imprint persists in the form of a network of droveways, which was once a carefully regulated form of commons. Burgeoning demographic growth is erasing large tracts of the historic environment. Against this backdrop of contestation, this paper draws on interdisciplinary approaches to interrogate the shifting legal and historical narratives through which pastoral landscapes have been managed, in the process revealing how dominant epistemological and legal frameworks are also implicated in the erasure of these landscapes.