Landscape Of Death And CommemorationBurial Space, Place and Evolution from Phoenician to Late Roman Malta

Malta’s thousands of rock-cut, underground burials are the result of a thousand years of funerary practices that evolved through the Phoenician, Punic, Roman and Byzantine periods. These have long attracted the interest of scholars but seldom has the data from these tombs been studied in a holistic manner, meaning that these temporal expressions of death, belief and commemoration have remained largely isolated from each other. This aim of my thesis is to investigate the sizeable corpus of funerary data available from Malta’s main ancient city of Melite in an attempt to recognise clusters and cemeteries over the various time phases being studied, in order to identify regional and chronological developments in form, design, content, décor and location. This includes relationships with the immediate environments of the tombs and hypogea, such as access and visibility. I also study related features, such as quarries, roads and cart-ruts. Critically, these analyses aim at getting to know the people involved in creating and being buried in these sites. Can we use the burials to learn more of contemporary communities and how they viewed these burial grounds? Were these sacred places within carefully selected landscape features or were utilitarian motives prevalent? My material is studied through several steps, starting with the detailed cataloguing and analysis of tombs and catacombs (many of which are only partially published or reported, if at all) with the aim of integrating all the typologies previously identified. This forms the basis onto which differences and similarities within and between the tombs – such as depositions, associated burial goods and decoration – as well as other features in tombs and in the landscape will be assessed. These relationships will be investigated both spatially and temporally, identifying links (or a lack of) between burial grounds through the different periods under review.