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Tarxien: What Do We Actually Know? Leer en español → Some ...

2026-10-26T02:40:33Z

Tarxien: What Do We Actually Know?

Leer en español →
Some images in this series may be AI-generated to visualize historical settings and hypothetical reconstructions. Unless otherwise credited, they should not be mistaken for archaeological evidence.
I was standing at the temples of Tarxien in Malta with a friend, wondering how people had built something like this thousands of years ago.
"Ancient aliens," he said.
"Why would you say that?" I asked.
His reasoning was that the builders had no machines or technology, so someone from outside must have helped them.
Perhaps part of the difficulty is that we struggle to imagine how people lived and thought five thousand years ago. We look at what they accomplished through the lens of our own experience, with little understanding of how they approached problems, organized their lives, or understood the world around them. Yet these were people with brains much like ours, capable of creativity, ingenuity, experimentation, and solving complex problems. And when we can't picture how something was done, it's tempting to conclude that it couldn't have been done.
My instinct is to explore every plausible natural explanation before reaching for the supernatural. So I decided to go down the rabbit hole and find everything I could about how these temples were built, so you don't have to.
And whatever I couldn't explain, we could leave for the extraterrestrials.
But first: what do we actually know?
Start With the Evidence
Before I could even begin thinking about how the temples were built, I needed to know what archaeologists had actually uncovered. How old were these places? What survived? And how much of the story could those surviving pieces tell?
What Archaeology Tells Us
These Temples Didn't Appear Out of Nowhere
Here's the first thing that caught my attention: Tarxien belongs to a much longer story. Malta's temple-building tradition developed over centuries during the fourth and third millennia BCE. The Tarxien complex took shape in phases over that long period, rather than appearing fully formed in a single burst of inspiration.
AI-generated conceptual reconstruction inspired by Tarxien. Architectural details and perishable structures are hypothetical.
Over generations, builders would have had opportunities to experiment, refine their methods, and pass along what they learned. We cannot reconstruct exactly how that knowledge was transmitted, but the archaeological sequence gives us good reason to think these monuments emerged from a developing tradition.
The Stones Have a Story to Tell
At Tarxien, the evidence is literally underfoot and all around you.
The complex consists of four megalithic structures, with curved chambers, substantial stone walls, intricate carvings, and fragments of monumental sculpture. Spirals and animal figures decorate some of the surviving stones.
Replica of the monumental skirted figure at Tarxien. The original is housed at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Photograph by Ricardo Alcocer, September 2026.
But something else caught my attention: the builders understood the materials they were working with.
They worked with two local limestones: harder coralline and softer globigerina. Both appear in temple walls, while the softer globigerina was particularly suitable for detailed carving. Their use of these materials gives us a tangible glimpse of technical choices.
These people weren't simply stacking rocks. They were selecting materials, shaping them, arranging them into complex architectural spaces, and decorating those spaces with recognizable patterns and figures.
We can see the results of their work. What we cannot necessarily establish is every tool they used, every technique they developed, or precisely how they organized the construction process.
But Was It Really a Temple?
There's something about archaeology that has always made me curious: how do we know what ancient structures were actually used for?
AI-generated hypothetical scene of communal activity at a Maltese megalithic complex. The activities depicted are speculative and do not represent established archaeological findings.
We call Tarxien a temple. But what makes it one?
Archaeologists have uncovered carved stones, animal imagery, architectural features, and other finds that researchers interpret as suggestive of ceremonial activities. Taken together, these discoveries provide reasons to interpret the complex as a place of ritual significance.
That interpretation deserves a closer look.
Consider something as ordinary as dealing with the dead. When archaeologists discover human remains, burials, or evidence of cremation, it's tempting to associate those findings with religious beliefs. And sometimes that interpretation may be correct.
But people also had practical reasons to dispose of their dead. Decomposition, scavenging animals, and the need to keep remains away from living spaces are concerns that require no supernatural beliefs whatsoever.
Of course, practical considerations and religious beliefs aren't mutually exclusive. People could have been motivated by both.
At Tarxien, there's an additional complication. After approximately 2000 BCE, parts of the complex were reused as a cremation cemetery in the Bronze Age, long after its original construction. Those later burials cannot automatically explain the intentions of the people who first built the structures.
And the question goes beyond burial practices. How do we distinguish a religious gathering from a communal feast? A ceremonial space from a meeting place? A sacred building from one that served several purposes?
The architecture, carvings, and archaeological discoveries give researchers legitimate reasons to propose ritual functions. But we have no written testimony from the builders explaining what happened inside.
We can examine the evidence, develop explanations, and test them against what we know.
But we should be careful about turning interpretations into facts simply because they've been repeated often enough.
The interpretation of Tarxien as a ceremonial or ritual complex is well supported by its architecture, carvings, and archaeological finds. What remains uncertain is the precise nature of those activities, the beliefs behind them, and whether the buildings also served other purposes.
The important thing is recognizing where the evidence ends and our interpretation begins.
What Survives Is Only Part of the Story
The surviving site has been excavated and conserved, and some elements have undergone modern restoration. A modern protective shelter now covers the site. What visitors see today needs to be understood alongside the excavation record.
Stone lasts. Rope, wood, fiber, and many other materials that could have been useful to builders often do not. The archaeological record is remarkably informative, but incomplete by its very nature.
That absence does not prove particular tools existed. It does mean we should be cautious about concluding that the builders had no technology simply because certain materials have not survived.
What We Still Don't Know
That brings me to the part I find most interesting: the boundary between what we can demonstrate and what we can reasonably imagine.
We can examine the stones, their arrangement, the marks left on them, and the wider archaeological context. But the precise sequence used to quarry, move, lift, and position each block remains uncertain. So do many details of the workforce: how labor was organized, how knowledge was passed on, and who made the decisions. The meanings of particular carvings and activities inside the temples are also open to interpretation.
A proposed method can be ingenious and still be wrong. To understand what happened here, we need to ask what evidence would support each explanation — and remain comfortable when the answer is that we don't yet know.
The more I looked at what survived, the more interested I became in the unanswered questions. The next one was also the most tangible: how did those enormous stones reach their final positions?
One Question Leads to Another
We know the stones got there. We know someone shaped and assembled them.
So how?
Next in the series: Getting the Stones There.
Reading a technology out of whatever survived is the same trouble as reading a solution when the problem is gone.
My friend's aliens are a mind filling a gap, the same reflex behind cargo cults and boxes that move on their own.
The reconstructions in this post are illustrations, not evidence, and photorealistic fiction keeps making that line harder to hold.
Sources and Evidence Notes
Dates and architectural development: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Megalithic Temples of Malta. Dates are approximate, not precise construction-year determinations.
Site features and later cremation cemetery after approximately 2000 BCE: Heritage Malta, Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex. The Bronze Age cemetery is a later phase and does not establish the Neolithic buildings' original purpose.
Limestone properties and the use of both stones in walls, with softer globigerina used for sculpture; shelter installation in 2015 and previous restoration interventions: Heritage Science, "Sheltering archaeological sites in Malta: lessons learnt" (2018).
Conservation, authenticity and restoration interventions: UNESCO World Heritage Centre. The terms "temple," "ceremonial," and "ritual" reflect scholarly interpretations rather than direct testimony about belief or purpose.
Preservation of perishable materials and questions about tools or lifting methods are general archaeological cautions, not evidence that any specific hypothetical device was used at Tarxien.
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I Went to Malta. I Have Questions. Leer en español → Sometime ...

2026-10-19T02:55:15Z

I Went to Malta. I Have Questions.

Leer en español →
Sometime during the pandemic, I fell into one of those YouTube rabbit holes.
It kept branching. Eventually it took me into Mesoamerica, Yaxchilán, Palenque and Bonampak, and into something I have a hard time describing simply as an interest in archaeology.
When I visit these places, I don't really see the rocks. I see all the connections they create in my head.
Somebody put that stone there. Somebody figured out how to move it and where to put it. Other people helped. They had tools, techniques, some form of organization, and presumably a reason for doing all that work.
Thousands of years later, we're trying to reconstruct those people from whatever happened to survive.
One of the early branches of that rabbit hole took me to Malta.
I had been watching "iceberg" videos about unexplained phenomena around the world. Ghosts, UFOs, disappearances, ancient mysteries, all the usual stuff. Mixed in were megalithic structures, underground chambers and strange human figures.
Malta kept coming up.
There was Ġgantija, on the island of Gozo, with enormous stones that had inspired legends about giants building the place.
There were these unusual human figures, often described as representations of a Mother Goddess or fertility goddess.
Then there was the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, carved underground into the limestone. I kept hearing stories about its acoustics and theories about whether some of its sonic characteristics were intentional.
I'm a musician. Of course that got my attention.
I wasn't particularly interested in believing any of it. Underneath the speculation were real places and real objects.
Somebody had made this stuff.
In September 2026, I finally went to Malta.
Three days across Malta and Gozo: September 18–20, 2026.
Valletta, Malta.
September 18
I started at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.
There were tools, pottery, carved stones and some of those human figures I had seen years earlier on a screen.
Now they were sitting in front of me.
The objects were real. What they meant was still very much a question.
National Museum of Archaeology, Valletta.
Later that day I went to the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground burial complex in use from roughly 4000 to 2500 BCE.
It's very different from the other sites I visited. Instead of building upward with huge pieces of limestone, these people carved chambers and passages directly into it, some resembling the architecture they were building above ground.
And yes, I wanted to hear the place.
The acoustics were one reason I knew the Hypogeum existed. I had heard the stories about resonance and sound behaving strangely inside it.
I don't know how much of that was intentional. I don't know that anybody does.
But I got to stand inside a place carved into the ground more than five thousand years ago and listen to it.
That was enough for me.
Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum. Photo: xiquinhosilva / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Resized.
September 19
The next morning I went to the Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex, whose four megalithic structures were built roughly between 3600 and 2500 BCE.
This was my first encounter with the big structures above ground, and photographs don't quite prepare you for their scale.
Standing next to one, my brain immediately went somewhere practical.
How the hell did they put that there?
Tarxien also made it clear this wasn't simply a matter of moving large rocks. There were carvings, rooms, entrances and deliberate architectural choices.
Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex.
From there I went to the Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra Archaeological Park. Ħaġar Qim was built roughly between 3600 and 3200 BCE; the structures at Mnajdra span roughly 3600 to 2500 BCE.
Ħaġar Qim came first.
Some of these stones weigh several tons. Somebody had to get them out of the ground, move them and stand them up.
No cranes, engines or steel tools. Whatever they did, they figured it out with the materials and knowledge available to them.
Ħaġar Qim.
Then I walked down to Mnajdra.
I kept reminding myself that none of this was what it had been.
Stone survives far more reliably than wood, rope, fabric or hides. Pigments can disappear. Surfaces erode. Five thousand years is a very long time.
So how much was missing from the picture I had in front of me?
Mnajdra.
September 20
The next day I went to Gozo and finally reached the place that had put Malta into my head years earlier: the Ġgantija Archaeological Park. The oldest of its two temples dates to around 3600 BCE.
I have trouble doing anything useful with a number like that, so I started placing it next to other things.
Stonehenge wasn't there yet. Neither were the Egyptian pyramids. Egypt hadn't even been unified under the pharaohs. Writing would emerge in Mesopotamia several centuries later.
And on a small Mediterranean island, somebody was already organizing enough people, knowledge and labor to move enormous pieces of limestone and turn them into architecture.
That's when 3600 BCE started to mean something to me.
This was the one with the giants.
There is folklore that giants built Ġgantija.
I love stories like that, but standing there looking at those stones, my brain goes somewhere else. Carl Sagan immediately comes to mind: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And giants are a pretty extraordinary claim.
Before wondering whether something extraordinary happened here, I want to know how far we can get without it. What could people with the tools and materials available five thousand years ago actually do? What does the archaeology tell us? What can we test? What can we infer?
Because the stones are extraordinary enough. Someone really did move them.
The question is how.
Experiments and archaeological evidence can tell us quite a bit.
And then there are things we may simply never know.
That was what I kept thinking about while walking around Ġgantija.
I wasn't really looking at rocks.
I was looking at what was left of people.
We don't know their names, what they called these places, exactly what happened inside them or precisely what they believed.
They figured things out, built things and left things behind.
And five thousand years later, I was standing there trying to understand them.
Ġgantija Archaeological Park, Gozo.
I came out of those three days with a bunch of questions.
What do we actually know about the people who built these places?
How did they quarry and move stones that large?
How did they get them upright and build with them?
What did these places look like when people were actually using them?
How much of their technology are we missing because the materials simply didn't survive?
That's what I want to spend the next few posts trying to figure out.
Standing in all that limestone is its own argument for leaving a stone for tomorrow, since almost nothing else lasts.
Lining 3600 BCE up against Stonehenge is the same move as watching time play tricks on a neat historical line.
Asking how far we get without giants is the habit that took me from analytics to archaeology in the first place.
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¿Ven a la pareja en el fondo? Yo los casé. Read in English → ...

2026-10-16T02:43:25Z

¿Ven a la pareja en el fondo? Yo los casé.

Read in English →
El 11 de agosto de 2017, durante unas horas, el condado de Santa Clara, California, me concedió la autoridad legal para casar a dos personas.
Y yo casi me había olvidado por completo de aquello.
Javier y Brenda son dos amigos puertorriqueños que conocí mientras vivía en el área de la bahía de San Francisco. Conectamos casi inmediatamente por una razón muy particular: tres personas de Caguas, Puerto Rico, habían terminado encontrándose a miles de kilómetros de su pueblo, en California.
Para 2017, Javier y Brenda ya habían construido una vida juntos. Aquella boda no era el comienzo de su historia.
¿Por qué decidieron casarse precisamente entonces? No recuerdo muy bien los detalles.
Y hay algo todavía más curioso: ni Javier ni yo recordamos exactamente cómo aquella decisión terminó convirtiéndose en otra bastante más extraña: que fuera yo quien los casara.
Lo que sí sé es que me tomé la responsabilidad muy en serio.
Hice los trámites correspondientes con el condado de Santa Clara y obtuve una autorización especial, válida por un solo día, para celebrar su matrimonio.
Y entonces escribí la ceremonia.
Algunas líneas del libreto de la ceremonia que encontré años después.
Hace poco encontré el guion original.
En un momento les dije que, si permanecían guiados por su compromiso, "no por visiones religiosas o por ley civil, sino por su deseo de amarse y vivir juntos a plenitud y sin límites", ese compromiso les ayudaría a orientar la vida que estaban construyendo juntos.
Quería que la ceremonia fuera significativa, pero completamente secular. Y, aparentemente, mi versión de 2017 no era particularmente sutil al respecto.
Es prácticamente lo mismo que diría hoy.
Hay otros pequeños detalles en aquel documento que son inconfundiblemente míos. Una sección lleva por título "NOW THE GOOD STUFF". Otra dice simplemente: "Ring Ring?".
Aquello no era un manuscrito elegante, preparado para que alguien más lo leyera. Era mi guion de trabajo, escrito para que yo pudiera estar allí, con mi teléfono en la mano, casando a dos amigos.
Así que allí estábamos, en Carmel, junto a la costa de California, haciendo algo que probablemente ninguno de nosotros habría imaginado cuando nos conocimos, tan lejos de Caguas.
Brenda y Javier intercambiaron las palabras que habían preparado. Intercambiaron los anillos.
Y finalmente llegué a la frase que convirtió toda aquella peculiar situación en algo oficial: "En virtud de la autoridad que se me ha sido concedida, los declaro casados".
Y así, sin más, había casado a mis amigos.
Ahora, al revisar las fotografías y encontrar aquel viejo guion, me sorprende lo extraña que puede ser la memoria.
Recordamos los grandes capítulos de nuestras vidas: los lugares donde vivimos, los trabajos que tuvimos, las relaciones, las cosas a las que dedicamos años.
Pero escondidas entre esos capítulos hay pequeñas historias que, de alguna manera, terminan desapareciendo en algún rincón de nuestra memoria.
Hasta que una conversación las trae de vuelta.
Ah, sí.
Una vez casé a dos personas.
Javier y Brenda siguen siendo amigos muy cercanos y, casi diez años después, siguen casados.
Si aquella ceremonia tuvo algo que ver con eso, entonces creo que hice un buen trabajo.
Volver a toparme con algo que yo mismo había escrito años antes ya me había pasado cuando le di a ChatGPT un libro que escribí en 2009.
La memoria tampoco avanza en línea recta, igual que el tiempo se dobla sobre sí mismo cuando uno mira la historia de cerca.
Y encontrarme casando a dos amigos en una costa de California encaja perfectamente con la carrera que nunca planifiqué.
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