Landscapes of Death and Commemoration

On Friday 25th October 2024, Heritage Malta is inviting you to an insightful lecture entitled ‘Landscapes of Death and Commemoration’ by Dr David Cardona, Heritage Malta’s Senior Manager for Phoenician, Roman, Medieval Sites and Archaeological Services, taking place at St Paul’s Catacombs in Rabat between 6.00pm and 7.00pm.

Antiquarian and archaeological investigations in the Maltese Islands have uncovered hundreds of Phoenician and Punic burials scattered across the entire territory, with particularly dense concentrations around the two main towns of the Islands of Malta and Gozo.

Although these tombs have been the subject of various publications, works on burials ranging from the Phoenician to the Byzantine periods have been marred by the lack of contextualisation. In fact, the location of these burials within the landscape and other man-made and natural features has rarely received in-depth scholarly attention. The result is that burials have normally been studied as single features or as a cluster divorced from the landscape in which they are located.

This presentation will present the results of doctoral research aimed at studying how the tombs functioned within the landscape. By mapping tombs and surface features in relation to spatial data, this research attempts to investigate the level of data that can be extracted from long-excavated sites. It will ask questions of whether these tombs can be clustered together and how these clusters functioned in relation to other features in the landscape.

Most importantly, it will assess how such clusters, as well as the changing patterns identified within and between them, can provide us with more data on the changing interactions with the landscape used by the living between the Phoenician and Late Antique Periods.

This event is free, but tickets need to be booked online on: Store – Heritage Malta or from any Heritage Malta Museum or site. The lecture will be delivered in English.