First developed in the Levant during the tenth millennium BCE, farming spread into Anatolia by the eighth millennium BCE, then crossed the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland in the middle of the seventh. From there the movement took two separate paths more or less simultaneously. Pioneers from Greece heading north brought the technology and culture of farming to the Danube Valley. A separate group made its way across the Adriatic to southern Italy, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. Italy was settled by the mid-seventh millennium BCE. Sardinia and Corsica followed soon after and served as jumping-off points for the spread of farming to southern France and Spain, where agriculture was established by the mid-sixth millennium BCE. Europe north of the Alps was colonized by farmers from the Danube Valley.1
Along with the founder crops and domestic animals, farming brought a radically new form of communal life to each successive region it affected. Architecture and pottery offer the most enduring evidence of this dramatic change, but there are many intangible aspects of culture associated with the advance of farming, including the organization of society, the relative status of men and women, language, mythology, and the conduct of worship. The new world picture that farming created as it transformed communities gave shape to social institutions. Without question, Mediterranean culture in its formative period was agri-culture. And like the foods on our dinner tables that date from the Neolithic, many of the languages spoken today are arguably part of this agricultural legacy.
Farming culture spread from the Levant to Greece and from there to the rest of Europe.
The origins of language and mythology, along with their connection to social structure, have been hotly debated since the nineteenth century. In 1869 the historian Johann Jakob Bachofen argued in a highly influential book that Western societies had first been governed by women and only gradually evolved what, from his and his era’s point of view, was the more advanced social system of patriarchy. Karl Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, picked up the idea, and an English novelist turned mythographer, Robert Graves, incorporated this notion in his compilation The White Goddess.2 In that book Graves argued that the patriarchal Olympian gods supplanted the primal goddess of the woman-centered Greek religion. Synthesizing emerging archaeological evidence with discoveries in comparative mythology, folklore, and linguistics, the prehistorian Marija Gimbutas refined the notion in a series of influential books in the mid-twentieth century. Her belief that early societies were matriarchal and worshipped a female deity—the Goddess—has captured the imagination of many outside the academic world. Essentially, she argued that “past societies in Europe and the Near East, especially prior to the so-called invasion of Indo-Europeans circa five thousand years ago, … were Goddess-worshipping, female-centered, in harmony with their environments, and more balanced in male-female relationships, in which the status of women was high and respected.”3
The goddess hypothesis describes the domination of nature as a masculine ideal; adherents assert that in the period of matriarchy, relations between human and ecological communities were harmonious. A contemporary school of thought that merges environmental thinking with feminist literary and social criticism makes a similar point. Called ecofeminism, it “focuses on the connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature.”4
Home ground for the matriarchal view of early societies is a group of farming communities that began to spread through the Danube Valley seven thousand years ago. Archaeologists became aware of these communities only during the twentieth century, and for much of that time, study of them was fragmented among competitive neighbors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, cross-cultural and international studies of these sites increased. The result of this still-active investigation has been the recognition of a culture of “Old Europe.” This culture flourished in much of the Danube basin from the western coast of the Black Sea eastward into the rich soils of Hungary. The culture was precocious and long lasting. It rested on a Neolithic package that originated in the Levant and reached the region through Greece. Between 5000 and 3500 BCE, the civilization of the Danube Valley was one of the largest and most technically proficient in the world.
The cultures of Old Europe refined the techniques of floodwater farming. Rather than cultivating small plots of stream-deposited soils, these communities cultivated the rich soil of the Danube Valley, which had many of the same qualities. The earth was moist, deep, and easy to cultivate. Fertility was renewed by intermittent flooding that added nutrients to replace those lost to crops. Unlike the desert, where the total area that could be intensely cultivated was quite small, the Danube floodplain covered hundreds of square miles.
Large expanses of rich soil encouraged housing clusters, and the villages of Old Europe could be quite large, certainly bigger than any housing concentrations that had existed before this time. Only the cities of Mesopotamia, which did not come into being until the fourth millennium BCE, would have rivaled them. Old European towns also existed for long stretches of time. As houses decayed, they were replaced by new structures built on the rubble of the old. So, like many Levantine sites, the villages of Old Europe became tell-like prominences in the flat alluvial landscape.
Excavations at these sites have revealed a communal pattern that is similar in many ways to life in Çatalhöyük. Houses were relatively uniform, though the towns had streets, and the houses had doors. Interiors in a typical village were roughly the same size. Though plenty of pottery and skilled metalwork have been found in burials throughout the region, the villages had no potters’ or metalworkers’ quarters, nor any evidence of social hierarchy. There were no obvious headmen’s houses and certainly no palaces. There is no evidence of a priestly caste, and there are no distinct shrines or temples. Religion appears to have been a matter of household practice. The undifferentiated architecture of the Old European villages, like that at Çatalhöyük, suggests an egalitarian social structure, which would be consistent with the goddess hypothesis. Whether or not these societies supported matriarchies or a culture of a goddess, their non-confrontational ecological attitudes embraced not just foraging but the cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals.
The cultures of Old Europe, which included the Danube Valley and the Hungarian Plain, featured floodwater farming, communal dwelling, and a matriarchal society.
The art of Old Europe has captured the attention and imagination of generations of researchers. Architectural elaboration is the norm at Çatalhöyük, but the most common art objects found in Danube sites are small, portable figurines. A few of these represent men. A larger number represent a range of wild and domestic animals. By far the greatest number of representations are of women. Though often found in isolation, female figurines are sometimes found in groups. One of the most striking finds of this kind was a clay jar containing twenty-one figures and thirteen small chairs. The figures were shaped and fired in the early years of Danube settlement.5 There are fifteen larger figures and six smaller ones. The chairs are on the same scale as the larger figures, who are usually exhibited seated in them. The physiognomy of each figure is about the same, but there are differences in shape, size, and painted or incised decoration. Each figure rests on enormous buttocks and thighs. Each has a small cylindrical torso with stubs for arms topped by an extended neck. Faces are indicated by pinched noses and incised eyes and mouth. The top of the head is typically flattened.6
One obvious characteristic of the figurines is their obesity. Whether that represents an ideal of beauty or even of fecundity, the figurines clearly show the effects of plentiful nourishment. In that way they may represent the community’s acknowledgment and celebration of agricultural success. The goddesses are fat because the soil and herds are productive and food is abundant.
Female figurines reveal much but not everything about the structure of Danube societies.7 Female dominance in one sphere did not carry over into another, and contemporary specialists believe that these communities were not strictly matriarchal: “Men seem to have controlled external relations involving trade and negotiations with neighboring chiefs, while the rituals represented by female figurines seem to have emphasized the dominant role of women inside the house, and perhaps were connected with ancestor cults centered on their mothers and aunts.”8 The norm was not matriarchy, then, but a sharing of power, with dominance of one gender in the external sphere and the other in the domestic sphere.
The goddess hypothesis may not be fully confirmed by archaeological evidence, but it remains a compelling ideal for many. The theory not only describes the characteristics of the putative age of matriarchy but also offers a conjecture about the forces that brought the era to an end. In Gimbutas’s view, matriarchal societies in Europe were overwhelmed in a series of invasions that began in the late fifth millennium BCE. Old Europe offers some confirmation of this theory. Archaeology shows that an astonishing number of settlements in the lower Danube Valley were burned and abandoned around that time. At a site in north-central Bulgaria, burned houses and human skeletons suggest a massacre. No new village sites from that era have come to light, but new kinds of graves are characteristic. These graves contain technologically inferior goods. Horse sacrifices mark some of these graves as well, and the consensus appears to be that a nomadic people erupted into the Danube Valley. One possibility is that, as Gimbutas suggested, Old Europe collapsed under pressure from the eruption into the lower Danube Valley of people who were mobile herders, possibly mounted on horseback, from the steppe grasslands of what is now Ukraine. A migration from the steppes does seem to have happened at about the same time as the collapse, but contemporary archaeologists are uncertain whether it caused the collapse or came about when a collapse brought on by some still-unknown factor had made Old Europe vulnerable.9
The eruption of mounted nomads from their homelands in the steppes has played a major role in shaping the thinking of a number of theorists. Not only have such invasions been invoked to explain the destruction of matriarchal society, they have also been linked to the history of the region’s languages. The broad family of what are called Indo-European languages includes existing and vanished tongues native to a swath of geography extending from Iceland in the North Atlantic to Bangladesh in South Asia.10 Within this range, there are areas where non-Indo-European languages prevail.11 In general, however, the languages of Europe, eastern Europe and the Balkans, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are all members of a single extended family. This family of modern languages is linked genealogically to others that are no longer spoken, including Ancient Greek, Ancient Persian, Latin, and Ancient Sanskrit. Many researchers believe that the commonalities among languages across this vast region could only have come about through mass migration of a distinct people.12
The task of giving this hypothetical people a name and a cultural identity was taken up by Gimbutas. What she identified as the Kurgan Culture was, in her mind, “a patriarchal, semi-nomadic, Indo-European-speaking group of stockbreeders who originated in the vicinity of the lower Volga and migrated westward across much of Europe.” Till the end of her life, Gimbutas continued to argue that the Kurgan Culture was the bearer of language and also of “patriarchy, patrilineality, (social) ranking, animal domestication (including that of the horse), pastoralism, mobility, and armament.”13
How widespread such an invasion might have been remains unclear. The archaeological record shows changes in culture that might correspond to an invasion. It is equally possible, however, that these cultural changes came about through the adoption by indigenous peoples of new ways of life. With this thought in mind, prehistorians began to ask themselves what movement in the Neolithic period had such a broad disruptive effect that it could produce massive shifts in language, culture, and mythology.
There are two possible answers to this question. One is the mass movement of peoples, the horse-powered invasions that Gimbutas argued for. The second is a social revolution of such magnitude that it led to the abandonment of an older way of life and the adoption of a new culture that included new language and new mythology. This would imply a revolution so widespread and so powerful that it made the rituals, symbols, myths, and sacrifices that reflected and supported an earlier way of life utterly meaningless. Society would have been rebuilt around an entirely different set of social and environmental conditions.
The spread of farming technology occurred at about the right time to explain the new social institutions, and it was certainly revolutionary. Could it be that the expansion of farming technology or developments within its system of values spread new myths, cultures, and languages? If so, the most likely group to introduce language and culture would not be nomadic invaders whose actions disrupted an agricultural way of life but the agricultural pioneers themselves. The most persuasive contemporary thinking about language spread recognizes this fact. The argument here is that migrants introduced Neolithic culture, technology, and language to new areas in a leapfrog movement across the Mediterranean and beyond.
In the mid-1960s a pioneering biological researcher named Luca Cavalli-Sforza began studying what is now called population genetics. Like Gimbutas, he was looking for evidence of migrations that could have spread a new culture and language across the Mediterranean world. Rather than turn to archaeology, Cavalli-Sforza investigated the human genetic record. So-called genetic research on human populations had been going on for a hundred years by this time, but that work had focused on visible variations like skin and hair color, eye and skull shape. Since many of these characteristics were associated with race, much of this investigation amounted to little more than a justification for nationalist and racist agendas.14
Cavalli-Sforza and his associates focused on a hidden phenomenon that had no racial or racist implications. Genetics determine the human blood groups or types, which, like skin color, serve as markers of heredity. From the beginning of mass conscriptions in World War II, industrial societies took blood samples and recorded blood types for individual troops. Soldiers from around the world participated in these levies, so enormous amounts of data were collected. These data, furthermore, include a sampling from nearly the entire world.
What Cavalli-Sforza first looked for in his data was any pattern in the distribution of different blood types that might suggest a movement of Mediterranean population from east to west. He found exactly that in a blood type that predominated in the Levant. This discovery suggested a population movement that seemed to correspond with the pathways by which farming technology had spread. The fledgling science of genetics had stepped in to settle a question that had stumped older and better-established disciplines.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, researchers developed and perfected two new forms of DNA analysis that gave good results from a relatively simple examination of genetic material. The first of these methods to come into widespread use focused on mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria, the energy producers in cells, are alien bodies suspended in human hosts. They are the descendants of bacteria that invaded the primate body multiple generations ago and established a symbiotic relationship with its cells. Mitochondria have DNA, but it is isolated from the human genome. It is passed intact from generation to generation without taking part in the sharing of genes that marks sexual reproduction. The mitochondrial DNA of each human being is identical to that of his or her mother.
In theory, then, the mitochondrial DNA of each living human should be identical and indistinguishable from that of the first woman. In time, however, DNA mutates. Over the multiple generations that separate us all from a common mother, our mitochondrial DNA—like our genomic DNA—has changed character. We are no longer all alike; we no longer fully resemble an Eve. Variations in human mitochondrial DNA create broad groupings that biologists have used to answer a number of questions about human origins and human affiliations.
At first, the mitochondrial DNA evidence appeared to confirm Cavalli-Sforza’s conclusions. The Mediterranean dispersal pattern from east to west that his research on blood types had demonstrated also showed up in surveys of mitochondrial DNA. In a short time, however, this apparent confirmation became a challenge to Cavalli-Sforza’s theory. Blood-type distributions lack a degree of resolution that mitochondrial DNA provides. Tracing the mutation history of the genes not only shows affiliations within a population but creates a timeline that was missing in blood-type research. Biologists assume that mutations of the kind that make a permanent impact occur quite infrequently. They estimate that on average such a change happens every ten thousand years or so. By counting the number of mutations that distinguish two populations and multiplying by this rough-and-ready figure a researcher reaches a conclusion about when two populations were last in contact.
Although the mitochondrial DNA evidence showed that the westward migration that Cavalli-Sforza argued for was correct in its geographical dimension, it also showed that his time scale was off. The number of mutations that distinguished the eastern and western ends of the population that shared an eastern Mediterranean blood type suggested that most of the migration Cavalli-Sforza attributed to the spread of early farming actually occurred many thousands of years before. Cavalli-Sforza’s blood types had traced Cro-Magnon era migration, not the movement of early farmers.
Though the bulk of mitochondrial DNA evidence pointed to a westward migration during the Paleolithic, not all of it did. Geneticists identified one marker that dated to the Neolithic. It, too, showed a progression from east to west, but the migration that it represented was small compared with the earlier one. The marker is most common in the Levant, so its origins are assured. It is found along the Mediterranean coast all the way to Spain, then northward along the Atlantic and into Britain. About 20 percent of the European population share this marker.
Farming might conceivably be spread by such a small population, and those who have looked to Cavalli-Sforza for support of their ideas about early farming have welcomed his data. Language spread, however, is not so easy to account for. The simplest model for language spread is population replacement, and the Neolithic marker in European mitochondrial DNA is much too scarce to suggest anything of the kind. The archaeological evidence, too, suggests that adoption rather than displacement is the most likely way for farming to have spread. If we accept that the immigrant population is smaller than the indigenous population, can we still link the spread of agriculture with the spread of language?
Numbers are crucial to the argument. If we imagine that every forager in the preagricultural Mediterranean spoke a single language, then a wave of new people that was smaller than the indigenous population might have been able to impose an elite language like Latin or French on the people they encountered, but it is far more likely that the incomers’ descendants would have ended up speaking the indigenous language. The Paleolithic foragers of the region probably did not speak a single language to begin with, however. In analogous situations in historic times, linguistic fragmentation has been the norm among hunter-gatherer groups. A rough count of indigenous languages of the pre-Colombian Americas, where foraging was widespread (though by no means universal), yields more than 1,300 names of languages, and these are just the names that have been recorded. Without doubt, the number understates, perhaps by a high percentage, the total number of different languages that Amerindians spoke before 1492.
Where linguistic fragmentation exists, the numbers game of language replacement changes. An incoming group that is linguistically and culturally unified can be small in comparison to the total indigenous population of a region in terms of genetics but overwhelming in comparison with any single language group within the region. Over time the incomers will be absorbed genetically. Yet as their distinctive genetic marker becomes increasingly rare in the population, their language could predominate. Population dynamics are the key to language change and the dominance of an incoming language over multiple indigenous languages.
Researchers, particularly the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, have adopted a “modified wave of advance” model to describe the simultaneous spread of farming and language.15 Cavalli-Sforza’s original wave-of-advance model had two phases. In the first phase a colony of farmers entered a territory where foragers had lived for millennia. The foragers and the farmers interacted rather than competed, since they used different resources in their shared ecosystem. Eventually they intermarried, and some percentage of foragers and their descendants took up farming. Boosted by the nutritional bonanza that farming created, the agricultural population grew much more quickly than the forager population. Foragers disappeared (or became herders) as farming expanded. Eventually the farming community reached the tipping point where the labor supply exceeded the cultivable land. Then the second phase of the wave of advance began. A portion of the farming colony migrated to new territory. The genetic signature they bore was already an unequal mix of imported and indigenous DNA. In their new colony, they repeated the process of interaction, intermarriage, and assimilation. As the population expanded, the process continued until the wave of advance reached the end of arable land. With each surge in the wave of advance, the DNA that characterized the original colonists was diluted still further. Through this mechanism a small migrant population could create a large cultural change while leaving a relatively small genetic trace.16
The wave-of-advance model is probably not the last word on the origins of Mediterranean languages. Still, the links between language and farming are persuasive. The effects of the Neolithic Revolution evidently spread westward from the Levant. It is not too much to imagine that language and social life spread along with the cultivation of the land. Mediterranean culture in its most fundamental sense is agri-culture.
Early researchers imagined towns and cities as a late phase in the history of cereal cultivation. The excavations at Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and a host of other sites in the Levant long ago overturned that assumption. Urban architecture arose from the lifeways of sedentary foragers like those at Çatalhöyük right at the start of the Neolithic Revolution. As that revolution extended its hold on community after community in its outward spread from the Levant, it eventually reached the territory of well-established and highly successful forager populations on the Atlantic and western Mediterranean coasts. These communities were among the last to adopt cereal cultivation and animal domestication. They were late, too, in adopting the most visible component of the Neolithic package: domestic architecture.17
For many of these late converts to agriculture the concept of the village was more important and more useful than the dwellings that made it up. They adopted the village as a symbol rather than as a place to live. In the process they transformed functional structures into idealized ones. Stonehenge is the most widely known monument of this kind, but it is only one among a multitude of structures scattered in a wide arc from Scandinavia and the British Isles along the Atlantic coast and south into the Mediterranean islands. These monuments represent a common response to the spread of domestication, but they take many forms. Stonehenge is a ring of monoliths, and there are similar, though smaller, rings in many other places. In some regions there are single standing stones or towers; in others, houselike structures called dolmens. The anthropologist Ian Hodder characterizes these monuments as a response to the agricultural package that communities new to farming adapted to their own particular needs. Hodder believes that megaliths “referred symbolically to earlier and contemporary houses in central Europe and, to a lesser extent, in Western Europe.”18
Viewed in a certain way, what the builders of these monuments did was not so different from the actions of the well-known cargo cults of New Guinea, who built simulated airstrips in isolated jungles, believing that the structures themselves were sufficient to call down planes loaded with rich goods. Neolithic imitators were not so naive, and the structures they created in imitation of houses or housing clusters served their societies in essential ways. In many coastal areas it was impossible for people to live close together and still exploit the resources that they depended on. Still, for agriculture to be successful, community coordination was important. In societies of this kind, unity came through acting in common rather than living in common. Buildings that could be created only by a coordinated community effort encouraged cohesion. Once built, these same structures could be used to host rituals that continued to promote and celebrate cooperation.19
In the Mediterranean region the most striking megalithic monuments are found on the remote, tiny island cluster of Malta. These islands were settled by Sicilian colonists sometime in the sixth millennium BCE. Steep limestone hills sustained scattered farms, but the main source of nutrition for the islanders seems to have been their herds of sheep and goats, pigs, and a few cattle.20
Excavators and explorers began to take note of these monuments in the early eighteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century most had been fully excavated and their descriptions published. Before the use of carbon dating, it was assumed that the “temples” of Malta were built at a relatively late date. Many experts thought that the example of the Egyptian pyramids might have inspired the temples, or that Egyptian artisans might have built them. Others turned to the architecture of the Greek islands or West Asia as possible sources. Carbon dating has shown that the earliest of the temple complexes on Malta itself and its largest adjacent island, Gozo, antedate the pyramids and the fortifications of the Minoans of Crete. It is now generally accepted that the temples on Malta are the most ancient architectural monuments not only in the Mediterranean but in the world.21
The temple of Ggantija in Xaghra, on the island of Gozo, dates from sometime between 3600 and 3200 BCE, after the fall of the Danube cultures but before the first great urban areas were created along the Euphrates and the Nile. The Hagar Qim temples near the village of Qrendi stand on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean and a nearby rocky island; they date from the same period. Just downhill from their commanding site is the more sheltered temple of Mnajdra. The most complete and most intricate temple site in Malta is at Tarxien on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding Maltese capital, Valetta. Though the active use of the Maltese temples lasted a millennium or more, the form of the complexes from Ggantija through Tarxien remained remarkably constant. Giant stones, some rough, others shaped, create solid perimeter walls. Each temple has a single entry that leads into a long central passage. This corridor widens in two or more spots to accommodate an intersecting pair of round-ended rooms. Most temples have two pairs of these lobed rooms. Some have a small apse at the end of the central path. The evident focal point of the temples is the niche at its far end, but this may not have been the case originally. Set at the endpoint of the temple’s central axis and in some of the apses, the niches are structured in much the same way as the doorways that lead to them. In Maltese art, the shorthand representation of the temple is this doorway niche.22
Temple sites on Malta and Gozo have the oldest architectural monuments in the world.
Carved panels in shallow relief decorated the temples; some of the wall slabs are incised with images as well. Tarxien is rich in blocks with shallow engravings of curling tendrils, generally organized into geometric patterns; in some cases, the tendrils curl into full spirals. Other blocks show long lines of animals in profile. Goats with sweeping or curled horns alternate with pigs in one long procession. A much-damaged block shows a sow and piglets alongside a bull. There are fire bowls and fire pits and the marks of fire on interior walls. There are large urns or bowls.
Figurines and statues are among the most revealing objects turned up by the excavators. Almost all of these are representations of human beings. In many cases, the images have enlarged buttocks, thighs, and calves, though this is not universal. There are many images of women and of others that are sexually ambiguous. Among cult objects, phalli alone or in clusters are most common. The most striking single object is the base of a larger-than-life-size statue of a standing figure, usually interpreted as female, who wears a skirt with a pleated hem. She stands on small feet from which enormous calves balloon.
The emphasis on fertility and the combination of animal and human figures are similar in the art of the Danube cultures, although a direct relationship is not likely. Because the temples mimic domestic architecture and because figures of women play so large a part in their ornamentation and in the objects associated with them, Hodder argues for a close link between the temples and the Maltese society that produced them. In his view, the temples were architectural expressions of the special status of women in this agricultural society.
Hodder suggests Maltese agriculture in its earliest phases could expand only as long as the labor supply increased. After a while, there were enough laborers to farm all the available land. At this tipping point, the social foundation began to change. Once there were plenty of field hands and shepherds, human reproduction was no longer the primary social engine, and the entire apparatus of rituals, architecture, and cult objects devoted to it lost their importance. Symbolic power passed from the house and the mystical body of the woman and refocused on landholding and inheritance. Symbols of masculine power and status took center stage.23
For Gimbutas, such a change would have been evidence of a sweeping substitution of aggressive patriarchy for nurturing matriarchy. Hodder’s theory is more conservative and, to my mind, more convincing. He argues that the symbolic role of women within the real or idealized household ceased to be the primary societal concern in Malta. Land replaced labor as the thing that mattered most. As this transition occurred, the gods and the rituals of fertility lost their magic and their believers; new cults took their place.
Though particular to Malta, Hodder’s theory might apply more broadly to the shift from undifferentiated female-centered societies to male-dominated ones. Rather than rely on invasion and the substitution of one community by another, his theory rests on an internal agricultural dynamic. The shift from foraging to agriculture multiplied the nutritional resources available to a community and increased its population. The wave of advance theory recognizes this fact by positing that when farmer communities outgrew their resources, some percentage of their members moved on to new territories. When migration reached the continental limits, however, migration was no longer an option. There was no place to go. At this point communities began to experience the pressures of limited resources. Labor became abundant and lost value. Land became scarce, and those forces, both real and symbolic, that controlled land gained prestige and influence. The old lifeways and mythologies that extolled female reproduction as the engine of abundance ceased to be plausible. A new system of beliefs replaced them.
Malta represents one of the best examples of the fundamental changes in community life that the Neolithic Revolution created. The dynamics of agricultural change were responsible both for the development of the temples of Malta and for their abandonment. Power remained the same, though its realm and its expression changed radically. What drove social transformation again and again on Malta and throughout the Mediterranean world was the regime of cultivation and domestication.
From a modern perspective, we might describe the cultural change that led to the abandonment of the temples as an environmental crisis. The anomie that the Maltese must have experienced during this period of conflict and confusion would probably be familiar to us. What prevented the Maltese from experiencing the full disaster that modern societies are going through now was the essential stability of their agricultural routine. Their crisis of belief was profound, but it was not grounded, as the modern one is, in the degradation of the physical link between their community and the biological world. Their crisis was spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. Though modern theorists are prone to treat the contemporary ecological situation as essentially a crisis of understanding, they are mistaken. Agriculture is not an idea; it is a practice. Repairing the modern ecological crisis requires not just an intellectual adaptation to changed conditions, like the one that the Maltese achieved, but a pragmatic readjustment of our partnership with the earth that nourishes us. We must think differently, yes, but we must act differently as well. Ideas will guide the change, but they are insufficient in themselves.