Gozo Stone Circle - Rediscovered By Joe Attard Tabone

The recent archaeological excavation at the Gozo Stone Circle with the wealth of finds recovered and the data painstakingly collected, will eventually give us a better dimension of understanding of early man in Gozo and his environment. The story of the Gozo Stone Circle you are going to hear comes from a layman and a non-academic. My credentials for speaking on this subject are based on a thorough knowledge of the area, extensive research of the site in museums, libraries and archives both local and foreign, an interest acquired in archaeology -and a love for Gozo.

Please bear with me if I use the first person frequently but some parts of the untold story of the Stone Circle are garnered from my diary and personal experience. I was born at Xaghra not far from the Stone Circle and the Ggantija Temples. In my middle teens, I devised a home-made muzzle gun without my parents' knowledge and in order to exercise absolute freedom in the use of this lethal weapon, I used to hide it in a wall, wrapped in a sack together with shot, between two huge stones. This wall was about one metre and a half high, about fifteen metres long and consisted of rubble and several huge megaliths. It was completely covered with a big olive tree, fig trees, cactus and wild almond trees and therefore it was the perfect hiding place. It was this coincidence that made me realise much later that the wall which offered the most obscure place for hiding my gun was the only standing megalithic remains of the Gozo Stone Circle. As a matter of fact I would never have realised the archaeological importance of this site had I not known every inch of this area. This is perhaps one of the very few exceptional cases when the shooting of birds has given forth some blessings in disguise.

Years later my researches directed me to look for and to discover the Gozo Stone Circle. As a result, the excavation concentrated on this area and to my great satisfaction proved to be the right location. In 1959 I reported this megalithic wall to Dr. David Trump, then Curator of Archaeology. We inspected the site together and he included it in the 1959/60 Museum Report as "a megalithic site with IIB [Borg in-Nadur Period - 1500 - 800 BC] sherds in the angle between the old and the new roads into the village of Xaghra". We did not realise then, that under our feet lay a great wealth of archaeological material and that this wall was part of the Gozo Stone Circle. The secrets of the site were still hidden in libraries, archives and underground.

In 1820, Lt. Col. John Otto Bayer was transferred from the classical Ionian island of Ithaca to Gozo as Commandant of the Troops and as Administrator of the Island. He was a man of learning and came from a well-to do family, of Dutch extraction from the paternal side and a mother with Anglo-Irish blood. Soon after he arrived in Gozo, he cleared the Temples of Ggantija of the debris and another minor temple in front of the main group using convicts from the Gozo Prisons and forking out all the expenses from his own pocket. Eventually he started a dig in the middle of the Stone Circle, arrangements being made with the tenant of the field. However, when the owner of the field suspected that there might be hidden treasure he insisted that excavation on his property should cease. This was a blessing in disguise for modem archaeologists, as otherwise the artefacts found on the site in the last few years would not have been recovered and most important of all, studied in their original context.

In 1834, Alberto de la Marmora, the Italian general and naturalist in the service of the King of Sardinia came especially to Gozo to write a report on the Temples of Ggantija and the Stone Circle after his friend Captain Smyth had sent him a copy of his publication about the archaeological remains of Gozo. De la Mannora was assisted by the artist Clemente Busuttil to draw the sites and make plans of them. Efforts were made to trace the Stone Circle but he was unable to find it. It is therefore evident that the destruction of the Gozo Stone Circle was already in progress, because a year later the German prince, Hermann Puckler-Muskau, was able to be directed to the Stone Circle and there he witnessed in disgust the destruction of the last surviving megaliths.

For many years we do not hear anything about the Gozo Stone Circle, until the beginning of this century when Albert Mayr, a scholar from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, searched for it in vain. The Brocktorff portfolio of the Ggantija series was purchased from a London antiquarian book dealer by our National Library in 1925. The tenant farmer continued as usual to cultivate the field. Besides numerous fruit trees growing there, he sowed clover and broad beans and every spring it was a delight to view the Circle covered with a carpet of wild flowers amongst the outstanding red of the clover and the background of Ggantija, Nadur and Malta in the distance. It was still the original background view painted by Charles Brocktorff many years ago. Alas! Much of it is now gone.

In the annals of the history of Maltese archaeology an important event took place in September 1985, when the First International Conference on Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean was held in Malta and many top archaeologists attended from all over the world. I seized the opportunity to take several groups of them over to Gozo and showed them round the archaeological sites, including The Stone Circle. Both the American and British archaeologists showed keen interest in these sites and I could feel their enthusiasm mounting to a competitive degree, with Dr. David Trump on one side and Professor Marija Gimbutas of the University of California in Los Angeles and her students on the other. The precarious situation of our archaeological heritage together with the fuss created by some interested NGOs during the Conference brought home the fact that something had to be done urgently. The local conservation societies and many delegates attending the Conference realised that the sites under threat had to be rescued or excavated before it was too late. The Head of the Department of Archaeology at the Malta University, Professor Anthony Bonanno, under whom this International Conference was being organised, followed up this idea of establishing a special project which came to be known as the Gozo Project. This developed into a joint venture between the National Museum of Archaeology and the Universities of Malta, Cambridge and later Bristol. This archaeological excavation is the most scientific ever to be undertaken in the Maltese Islands. It took all the summer seasons between 1987 and 1994. A burial sequence was revealed in the middle of the Circle that continued from the earliest Temple Period (Zebbug) 4100 BC to the latest (Tarxien) 2500 BC followed by a further phase of limited occupation most prominent in the Tarxien Cemetery period 2500 - 1500 BC. The hundreds of individual skeletal remains should give an illuminating picture of a prehistoric community in Gozo were it possible to apply the modem technique of DNA. I leave this part of the story to the professionals.

During the initial stages of this excavation I was glad to share with the archaeological team all that I knew about the site. What is important is that my labour was not in vain and that through the dedication of the many people who have worked so hard to unravel and expose the secrets of the Gozo Stone Circle with the collaboration of various organisations, firms, universities, and Government Departments, last but not least the Ministry for Gozo, our small island has gained a prestigious place on the archaeological map of Europe and that of the Mediterranean.

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Copyright © 1996. All rights reserved, J. Attard Tabone
Revised: August 30, 2005 .