Heritage Malta’s Ghar Dalam is a natural, water-worn cave in the lower coralline limestone. The site is located about 500 metres from St George’s Bay in Birzebbuga, right in the north-east bank of the beautiful Dalam Valley. The cave stands 15.5 metres above sea level and is 144 metres deep. For safety reasons only the first 70 metres are accessible to the public.
Ghar Dalam is one of Malta’s oldest national monuments. Its main attractions are its prehistoric deposits containing extinct Pleistocene (Ice Age) dwarf mammalian fauna, mainly hippopotamus, red deer, elephant, brown bear, wolf and fox. Scanty remains of birds, frogs, turtles, dormice, voles, rats and skinks were also recovered.
This Pleistocene mammalian fauna reached Malta from the European mainland at the time of the glacial period of the Ice Age, about 200,000 years ago, when land bridges existed between Sicily and Malta. At that time the Mediterranean Sea was considerably lower than it is at present. These land bridges provided the possibility for the European fauna to escape the unfavourable environmental conditions of Europe, when most of its northern and central regions were covered with ice sheets.
The ice sheets never reached Malta but the effects of the Ice Age were considerable. The abundant rain of the Pleistocene period caused floods and rivers, which excavated most of the Maltese valleys. At Dalam Valley the river gradually eroded its bed into a subterranean tunnel until it finally reached and penetrated the tunnel’s roof. Large numbers of Pleistocene animal carcasses, clay, pebbles, stones, soil and other debris were sucked into and deposited in this cavern.
The deposits and excavations
A sequence of deposits that once filled the first 70 metres of the cave lies over the lower coralline limestone bedrock. The lowest deposit is a clay layer that contains no organic material. On top of it one finds the hippopotamus layer, with abundant remains of Maltese Pleistocene hippopotamus and elephant. Then follows a pebble layer over which was deposited the deer layer. This layer is characterised by huge amounts of Maltese Pleistocene deer remains and sparse remains of fox, wolf, bear, vole, bat and shrew.
A thin calcareous sheet capped the Ghar Dalam Pleistocene deposits. On top of this sheet is the cultural layer, which yielded a number of remains that are associated with the earliest period of human occupation of the Maltese islands: pottery remains, stone axes, shell beads, flint and obsidian flakes, bone points and domestic animal remains. It was from this layer that Malta’s most primitive “Ghar Dalam phase pottery” was recorded and recovered. It denotes a distinctive type of pottery, known as “impressed ware”. The cave lends its name to this important prehistoric phase, dating back to 5200 BC.
The cave was first recorded for its great importance in 1647 by the Maltese historian Gio. Francesco Abela. In 1865, Italian geologist Arturo Issel investigated the cave for remains of Palaeolithic man, but he only discovered prehistoric remains associated with the earliest human occupation of Malta.
Between 1892 and 1937 a serious of large-scale excavations were carried out by John H. Cooke, Giuseppe Despott, Carmelo Rizzo and Guzè Baldacchino. The large amounts of organic remains unearthed from the cave created a huge storage problem, and in 1930 the government erected a small museum to house them. The cave was opened to the public in 1933 and during World War II it served first as an air raid shelter and later as a fuel storage depot.
The Museum
The museum has two large halls on either side of the main entrance passage. The old exhibition hall was set up in 1936 by Dr Guzè Baldacchino and consists of a number of wooden show cases displaying practically everything that was recovered from the cave during the excavations. The display cases hold thousands of identical semi-fossilised bones decoratively wired on wooden boards, in Victorian style. There are also four showcases containing the modern skeletons of a brown bear, an African elephant, a hippopotamus, a fox, a wolf and a red deer, displayed for comparative purposes.
The new exhibition hall was opened to the public in 2002. It consists of an informative thematic exhibition, detailing the formation and history of Ghar Dalam and how and why remains of prehistoric animals were found in the cave. It also explains the origin of Maltese rock formation and the exposed rock sequence of the islands.
Other display cases are dedicated to the Ice Age and its effects on Malta, evolutionary adaptations of Pleistocene animals to island conditions and Malta’s most important Pleistocene sites. Prominently displayed are the organic remains of different Maltese Pleistocene endemic species recovered from the cave deposits. The display also includes a historical section dedicated to the scholars who carried out Pleistocene research in Malta. Two large paintings representing Wied Dalam during the Ice Age and Wied Dalam in modern times are also on display.
Heritage Malta – the organisation responsible for Ghar Dalam cave and museum – is currently working on the construction of an activity room for children, which is almost completed. The activity room will have lecture and presentation facilities, mostly aimed at grades five and six and Forms one, two and three students. Students visiting this site will have the chance of taking part in a brain-storming session on the reasons for their visit and what they expect to see. A brief guided tour of the cave and the museum, highlighting the most important aspects, will follow. Each students will also receive a workbook.
Ghar Dalam cave and museum are open daily from 9am to 5pm. Last admission is at 4.30pm.