Heritage Malta senior curator Reuben Grima and curator Katya Stroud recently presented papers on Malta’s neolithic temples at an international conference held at Magdalen College in Cambridge.

Prehistoric Malta was the main focus of the conference, entitled Cult in Context: Comparative Approaches to Prehistoric and Ethnographic Religious Practices. A range of archaeological and anthropological research was presented for discussion, with the aim of promoting the understanding of prehistoric religion and spiritual activity.

The two-day conference was the culmination of a research programme funded by the Cambridge Templeton Con-sortium (Templeton Found-ation) and conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Heritage Malta.

During the conference, Reuben Grima spoke about the cultural construction of the landscape in Neolithic Malta and Katya Stroud shed new light on how temple sites have been discovered, explored and managed in historic times.

Other contributors to the conference included David Trump, David Barrowclough, Simon Stoddart, Caroline Malone and Anthony Bonanno – all co-directors of the Xaghra Stone Circle excavations. The five academics also delivered papers during Heritage Malta’s annual international conference that was held in Gozo last November.

The conference was also attended by Malta’s High Commissioner in the UK, Michael Refalo, together with Heritage Malta’s new CEO Luciano Mulé Stagno.