More than a thousand years ago, at the edge of Western Europe, 10th century Córdoba was the capital of Islamic Iberia, the “Jewel of the World”, symbolizing cultural and intellectual efflorescence. According to historical sources, the ruins of the mythical caliphal city-palace of Madīnat al-Zahrā were located a short distance further west of La Mezquita. The raison d’être of this citadel has been investigated from a multidisciplinary approach for more than two decades. The present investigation illustrates the significance of the roles of architecture, astronomy and philosophy at a time when Caliph Abd al-Rahman III embarked on building “The Brilliant City” in 941. While the elaborate artistic programme attests to the magnificence of the architectural styles, this research considers religious and philosophical factors as the possible prime motives behind the design of the royal ceremonial spaces.

With its long tradition of trade contacts with the eastern Mediterranean, coupled with the productivity of the region of Campania, by the 1st C AD Pozzuoli rapidly became a centre for technical and commercial expertise. Its richness in archaeological remains, coupled with its unique geological setting, has resulted in a wealth of scholarly research, particularly on specific public monuments of the port.
Pozzuoli has also been represented in many ways throughout various periods in time – paintings, etchings, narratives. A digital visualization is another form of representation that can be added to the port’s repertoire of descriptions. The talk will look at some of the more interesting aspects of the speaker’s PhD thesis, namely Pozzuoli’s geography and archaeology. It will also undertake a critical assessment of some of the digital models, and in particular how they were built using the methodology principles set out by the London Charter: what worked, what did not work – and what the speaker wished she had known at the time.

The study of ancient DNA is becoming increasingly useful for gaining information which
cannot be obtained through traditional archaeological methods. The Maltese climate is not
well suited to ancient DNA preservation, and prior to Dr Josef Caruana’s Ph.D. work, no studies on DNA in a Maltese archaeological context had been carried out. Dr Caruana, a curator at Heritage Malta, will give a presentation of the work conducted on samples taken from one Temple period and two late Roman archaeological sites in Malta. Dr Caruana’s talk will also consider the limitations of such studies.

The archaeological record of the European Neolithic is marked by thousands of megalithic monuments of varied styles. Patterns in the orientation of similar megaliths betray a deliberate intent in their construction that can, in some cases, be related to topographic features or celestial events of prominence in the cosmology of their builders. This talk will introduce the field and methodologies of archaeo-astronomy, as complementary to other archaeological approaches. It will then apply them to the specific case of the megalithic structures built in Northwest Iberia during the Mid to Late Neolithic (c. 4000 cal BC). Focusing first on a cluster of passage graves in Carregal do Sal (central Portugal), a pattern in orientation is identified relating the structures to both a conspicuous mountain range on the horizon and the red star Aldebaran that would rise above it. This, it is suggested, marked the time for these Neolithic pastoralists to move to the mountain range, “following the star”. Toponymic folktales that tell similar stories are also considered. Finally, other megalithic clusters in north Portugal are also discussed, and the potential role played by such Neolithic stars discussed.

From about the late first century BCE, a stone-vessel industry emerged in ancient Palestine which produced a unique corpus of chalkstone vessels whose distribution is virtually limited to Jewish sites. Many scholars link the use of these vessels with Jewish purity practices. In this lecture, Dr Dennis Mizzi will present an overview of ritual purity in ancient Judaism while also exploring the use of chalkstone vessels within this framework. In addition, Dr Mizzi will present preliminary results from the recent excavation of a stone-vessel workshop at ‘Einot Amitai (near Nazareth).