Cremation burials in early Bronze Age Malta : evidence from Tarxien and Ggantija
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A common way of disposing of the dead \nacross the entire Mediterranean (and even \nbeyond) from prehistoric down to late Roman \ntimes was to bury the corpse - or the burnt \nremains, if cremated - in a built chamber or \nin a floor cavity and then cover it up under \na mound of stones and/or earth, usually \nencircled by a kerb or retaining stone wall. \nSizes varied and larger ones might even \nhave a passage providing access to the burial \nchamber. In many cases, these burial mounds \nor tumuli used to be circular, having an overall \nappearance of a cone, hut, or hill. \nIt is worth investigating whether the \nresemblance of burial mounds to huts was \nintentional or merely accidental (something \nwhich I do not intend to do in this contribution). \nIf it was intentional, was it meant to convey \nan idea of the tomb as a house of the dead? In this contribution, I shall be dealing \nwith cremation burials on the Maltese islands \nin the early Bronze Age (Tarxien Cemetery \nphase: 2400-1500 B.C.), focusing, towards \nthe end, on a type of clay figurine associated \n- as yet, exclusively - with this early Bronze \nAge practice. Some new interpretations \nare attempted in respect of both the burials themselves as well as the mentioned \nfigurines. To this end, I shall be resorting \nto evidence from two temple sites: those at \nTarxien and Ggantija, with the richer corpus \nof evidence coming from the former. To begin \nwith, I derive insights for my interpretations \nby initially resorting to the earliest literary \nevidence we have and which concerns the \nAegean region where it comes from. But I also \ndraw on comparisons with some other sites \nand/or materials outside the Maltese islands. It \nis mainly this comparative approach that, for \nthe greater part, provides the backbone of my \narguments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".