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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".