/library/oar/handle/123456789/63944 Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:07:33 GMT 2025-11-11T12:07:33Z :443/library/oar/retrieve/710087ba-7bd7-4218-9d01-69631e65942d/Temple landscapes.jpg /library/oar/handle/123456789/63944 /library/oar/handle/123456789/64298 Title: A bonanza of angelfish (Perciformes : Pomacanthidae) in the Mediterranean : the second documented record of Holacanthus ciliaris (Linnaeus, 1758) Authors: Deidun, Alan; Galdies, Johann; Zava, Bruno Abstract: The second record of the Queen angelfish, Holacanthus ciliaris (Linnaeus, 1758), is hereby documented for the Mediterranean, through a single individual spearfished within Maltese coastal waters. Considerations on the potential introduction pathway for the species, which is popular in the aquarium trade, are made. Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/64298 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/64297 Title: Temple landscapes : fragility, change and resilience of Holocene environments in the Maltese Islands Authors: French, Charles; Hunt, Chris O.; Grima, Reuben; McLaughlin, Rowan; Stoddart, Simon; Malone, Caroline Abstract: The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast) has explored issues of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This, the first volume of three, presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a programme of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo. Buried deposits extracted through coring and geoarchaeological study yielded rich and chronologically controlled data that allow an important new understanding of environmental change in the islands. The study combined AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with detailed palynological, molluscan and geoarchaeological analyses. These enable environmental reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes and the changing resources exploited by the islanders between the seventh and second millennia bc. The interdisciplinary studies combined with excavated economic and environmental materials from archaeological sites allows Temple landscapes to examine the dramatic and damaging impacts made by the first farming communities on the islands’ soil and resources. The project reveals the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system of the island landscapes, as well as the adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity, in the face of climatic change and inexorable soil erosion. Neolithic people evidently understood how to maintain soil fertility and cope with the inherently unstable changing landscapes of Malta. In contrast, second millennium bc Bronze Age societies failed to adapt effectively to the long-term aridifying trend so clearly highlighted in the soil and vegetation record. This failure led to severe and irreversible erosion and very different and short-lived socio-economic systems across the Maltese islands. Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/64297 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/64293 Title: Foreword Abstract: Sustainability, as applied in archaeological research and heritage management, provides a useful perspective for understanding the past as well as the modern conditions of archaeological sites themselves. As often happens in archaeological thought, the idea of sustainability was borrowed from other areas of concern, particularly from the modern construct of development and its bearing on the environment and resource exploitation. The term sustainability entered common usage as a result of the unstoppable surge in resource exploitation, economic development, demographic growth and the human impacts on the environment that has gripped the World since 1500. Irrespective of scale and technology, most human activity of an economic nature has not spared resources from impacts, transformations or loss irrespective of historical and geographic contexts. Theories of sustainability may provide new narratives on the archaeology of Malta and Gozo, but they are equally important and of central relevance to contemporary issues of cultural heritage conservation and care. Though the archaeological resources of the Maltese islands can throw light on the past, one has to recognize that such resources are limited, finite and non-renewable. The sense of urgency with which these resources have to be identified, listed, studied, archived and valued is akin to that same urgency with which objects of value and all fragile forms of natural and cultural resources require constant stewardship and protection. The idea of sustainability therefore, follows a common thread across millennia. [excerpt] Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/64293 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/64290 Title: Introduction Authors: Malone, Caroline; Stoddart, Simon; Hunt, Chris O.; French, Charles; McLaughlin, Rowan; Grima, Reuben Abstract: The FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory) was devised to explore issues of prehistoric island sustainability set against the background of environmental change and instability. Particular foci were the fragility and sustainability of society and environment in the Maltese Islands (Fig. 0.1), primarily during the Neolithic period of the sixth to third millennia bc. Specifically, the research team aimed to understand and explain the nature of the impact of expanding human populations on a restricted, resource-limited and fragile environment such as the Maltese Islands. Our goal was to advance knowledge of the mechanisms and innovations (cultural, technological and political) that traditional (prehistoric) farming societies developed in order to cope with changing resource availability and environmental unpredictability. We sought to understand how some societies managed population impact and sustained their socio-economic system and culture over long periods of time through examining the evidence preserved in the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records. Island studies have long interested archaeologists and ecologists. An island represents a conveniently circumscribed landscape of known size, surrounded by water, and thus remote from larger landmasses and their biological and cultural stimuli. They are sometimes taken as a microcosm of the situation of the human species in a severely circumscribed and overcrowded planet. From the seminal ecological studies of Charles Darwin (Jones 2009) and Alfred Wallace (1892) in the nineteenth century, to the rich theoretical literature on biogeography and equilibrium theory in islands first initiated by MacArthur and Wilson (1963, 1967), an entire sub-discipline of island studies has developed. The studies range from Simberloff’s equilibrium theory (1974), the ecology models of Gorman (1979), ecological anthropology (Vayda & Rappaport 1968) to current ideas of evolution and equilibrium (Lomolino et al. 2010) and colonization (Cox et al. 2016). Generally, the bulk of research has been focused on non-human subjects, with issues of extinctions and conservation foremost, but nevertheless, a number of important theories and models from these island studies are relevant to archaeology. [excerpt] Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/64290 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z