unworthy of consideration. This is evident from surviving correspondence among those who pulled the strings in archaeological circles in the post-war years.viii Ugolini was dead, and his findings were buried with him.

Drastic and aggressively defended interventions in the dating of Maltese human and cultural prehistory followed, all with the purpose of putting an end, once and for all, to any idea of a high antiquity of the Maltese temples. The implementation of this strategy rested upon two pillars. One: it was decreed that no humans had ever set foot on Malta before 4,000 BC, later revised to 5,200 BC. And two: the assertion originally introduced by Arthur Evans that no temples were built earlier than 2,500 BC was introduced again. This was later revised to 4,000 BC, madethe Maltese temples on display in the British Museum.

Malta’s great temple ruins had been effectively denied their rightful place and pushed out of the perceived mainstream of human cultural history.

This was the setting when, in the wake of the groundbreaking work by Alexander Thom on the astronomy of the megalithic sites in Britain, similar investigations started in Malta too. George Agius and Frank Ventura, lecturers at the University of Malta, were the very first to securely measure the orientations of all the megalithic temples whose regular ground plans were either known or still extant. Altogether nineteen temples could be included.

Their first article, ‘Investigations into the Possible Astronomical Alignments of the Copper Age Temples in Malta,’xi published in 1980, is interesting in several respects. They accurately established the azimuths,