Documentary sources for a study of the Maltese landscape

Abstract

Tangible objects form a challenging kind of historic record. They challenge us because we know that objects have meaning if only we know how to decipher it; moreover by their very presence, and refusing to go away, objects demand to be interpreted. To archaeologists no form of material artefact is perhaps more challenging - tantalizing and illuminating at one and the same time – than the vast disorderly collection of human artefacts that constitute the cultural landscape. By cultural landscape, archaeologists (but also geographers) mean the total assemblage of visible things that human beings have done to alter the face of the earth for economic, social, religious, or symbolic purposes: quarries for the extraction of building stone and clay; dams to control water, cisterns to store it and conduits to deliver it for irrigation purposes and to sustain human and animal life; the purposeful manipulation of the earth's vegetative cover in farms, woodland, orchards and terraces; tracks, paths and roads used to transport objects and ideas; walls erected to subdivide land into manageable units and to separate portions of the earth from one another.