In-Nuffara is a flat-topped plateau that together with the villages of Xagħra and Nadur forms a triangle in the southern part of Gozo.

On a windy but sunny afternoon in late November, the hill offers a wonderful panorama of green fields and valleys.

But that was not the (prime) aim of a group of people who on Friday 18 November assembled at the Ta’ Ħamet roundabout and slowly began the rather long climb to its summit.

They were there to hear famous archaeologist and scholar David Trump give an open-air impromptu lecture up there in the cold wind.

The on-site lecture was part of the Festival Mediterranea 2011 organised by Teatru Astra.

For In-Nuffara is the site of a Bronze Age settlement.

This is the only such example in Gozo while there are several in Malta. No one knows exactly why that is so. Nor is it clear whether they lived on top of the hill for defensive reasons or because that is where they stored water and grain. In the latter case, it would have been rather hard work to climb down every morning and more so every evening to climb up from the fields in the valley.

Among the comparable sites in Malta one can list Borġ in-Nadur, Il-Wardija ta’ San Ġorġ, Ras il-Ġebel and Il-Qolla in Burmarrad. It could be that the Cittadella in Victoria was also a Bronze Age village itself but nothing from the Bronze Age has ever been found there except for some pottery from the Borġ in-Nadur period in the 1960s.

Other settlements in Gozo tended to be more on the hillsides such as the Tarxien Cemetery village at the Xagħra Circle. Here no real remains of settlements were found but a quantity of mud, some one metre in depth, was found. This grey clay mud could have been the sludge from the Bronze Age huts after they were swept away by rain or floods. Lots of pottery was also found there.

These remains date from the third period of the Bronze Age − 2400 to 2000 BC. Pottery from this period was also found during excavations of the Victoria power station. And one urn found in the shipwreck in Xlendi Bay also dates from the Tarxien Cemetery people time – maybe it meant that someone had lost his lunch.

The reason why the people of the Borġ in-Nadur time chose to live on hilltops is still being disputed: was it because of some external aggressor or because of internal conflict? Professor Trump believes there was no external aggressor involved but rather rivalry between the various settlements. In contrast, the temple period inhabitants seem to have lived in blissful harmony.

Originally, all pottery from Malta and Gozo sites resembled each other very much but later the pottery from In-Nuffara started having little dark red or brownish spots designed on the red surface of the pots.

Similar pots have been found on Dingli Cliffs and at Baħrija.

Little can be seen on the In-Nuffara surface of any remains of the Bronze Age settlement. The same has happened at Borġ in-Nadur, which was first explored in the 1960s. The huts used by the Bronze Age people would have a base of around one metre and built of stones or rocks topped by mud bricks. The roof would be a rough timber framework (timber was quite scarce in Malta at that time) covered with a layer of clay to ward off the rain.

Recent excavations at Tas-Silġ have turned up a number of Tarxien temple phase pottery immersed in a chunk of dark clay.

However, what defines Bronze Age settlements are the rock cut pits, often bell-shaped. Were they used for storing water or for storing grain? Opinion of experts is split either way. Maybe they were used for both. At Baħrija some are still used to water the fields.

The ones at Wardija ta’ San Ġorġ on Dingli Cliffs have grooves cut around the top presumably to hold a lid. You don’t need that to preserve water. Later on, when we toured the In-Nuffara top and spent some time examining its unique feature of two interconnected pits, some in our group noticed they too have grooves around the top. Of that, more later.

Bronze Age people, contrary to what the Knights were to do thousands of years later, had no use for elaborate defences. They sited their habitations right at the top of hills, so there was no real need to build walls. Their huts were rudimentary and they only needed the silo pits.

Despite the fact that so many thousands of years have elapsed, it is still possible, as we were about to see, to find parts of Bronze Age pottery not just at In-Nuffara but also in so many other sites. The Xagħra Circle, just a valley away from In-Nuffara, has turned up lots of Bronze Age fragments. More have been found between the Circle and ta’ Ħamet. More were found when work was done on the Mġarr Road in Għajnsielem and there may be others.

Another clear evidence of a Bronze Age settlement are cart ruts. These seem to have been dug in the Borġ in-Nadur period but maybe they continued to be dug later as well. There are cart ruts in localities such as Ras il-Ġebel, Borġ in-Nadur itself, and in Gozo at Ta’ Ċenċ, Xewkija, and in Dwejra and Qala, that is, the two extremities of Gozo.

The connections between the Bronze Age period and the temple builders are not really studied, Prof. Trump concluded. Did the Bronze Age people kick out the temple builders or were they also expelled from Malta like what happened to the temple builders? That is why the suggestion, which Prof. Trump was to make the next day, to try and study the DNA strands to find out if there was a connection, was so crucial.

The lecture over, in windy and cold conditions on top of In-Nuffara, Prof. Trump led us in a walk around the flat-headed top. There are, he said, around 20 silos on the top, but most are covered with vegetation at this time of the year.

It is clear why the In-Nuffarin needed next to no defences. The ridge is a sheer cliff drop all around.

(On the Xewkija side there is the Ta’ Xħajma racing track and, while we were up there, there seemed to be a small plane practicing touch and go on the racecourse).

When we came to the side facing Xagħra, we found the twin silos Prof. Trump had spoken about. We stood around while he continued with his talk and then, when someone asked him how deep the pits were, the 80-year-old professor jumped nimbly down. And when someone asked him if the two are interconnected, he ducked down and came up, like Jack in the Box, in the other.

They had Judas trees in Bronze Age times

Prof. Trump also told us a story dating back to the time when he was Director of Museums between 1958 and 1963.

One day a farmer from Luqa came to the museum. He said he had a field near the cemetery and in summer used to notice that while the rest of the field was dry, there were spots where the vegetation even in summer was green.

Intrigued, he dug and found that there were silos in the field. He dug into the silos and found a quantity of bones, which he brought them to the museum.

The bones turned out to be pig bones, but Prof. Trump’s curiosity was roused. He reasoned that since the bottom of these pits remained damp, pollen from the Bronze Age could have been kept intact all through the millennia years.

He collected some and sent it to a professor friend of his at Cambridge University.

The results, when they came, were not that encouraging: after analysis, it seemed that there was very little difference between today’s pollen and that of Bronze Age times.

However, the Cambridge professor provided some silver lining: the pollen shows there were Judas trees in Malta in Bronze Age times and also olive trees, though he could not say if the olive trees were wild or of the domestic kind.

The Cambridge professor’s report was included as an annex in David Trump’s book on the Skorba excavations.