New insights on tomb architecture and burial in Phoenician to Late Antique Malta

Lecture by Dr David Cardona Bionote

Recent studies on the funerary landscape of the area around the ancient town of Melite have provided various insights on the connection between zones reserved for the living and those reserved for the dead. This included information on what the two could tell us about the other. Consequently, this research also provided a deep insight on the multiple tomb and burial typologies within the area of study. This presentation will primarily focus on the data and analysis of this last part. It will thus look at past interpretations and ideas about tomb typologies between the Phoenician and Late Antique periods, comparing old and new proposals on the changes in tomb and burial architecture.

David Cardona is an archaeologist with a very broad range of interests. He has interest in the archaeology of architecture and ancient technologies and, more recently, landscape and burial archaeology. He has researched the use of stone within buildings on the Maltese Islands the Prehistoric period in fulfilment of his Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology, while his MA thesis dealt with the architectural decoration of Roman buildings on Malta and Gozo. This culminated in his book “Roman Architecture in Malta”. His doctoral degree from the University of Leicester, called “Landscapes of Death and Commemoration: burial space, place and evolution from Phoenician to late Roman Malta” combined various forms of spatial data onto a GIS platform to analyse landscape use, connections and transformations. He currently holds the position of Senior Manager for the Archaeological Research Unit and Senior Curator for Phoenician, Roman and Medieval sites within Heritage Malta.