A substantial part of the surface of the Maltese islands (Malta and Gozo) is covered by two strata of exposed hard coralline limestone that formed under the sea around 30 and 5 million years ago, before the islands were raised up by colliding intercontinental plates. Much of this limestone is covered by strange man-made double channels with a gauge of around 1.4 metres - so-called ‘Cart-Ruts’. The purpose and age of these has been much-discussed, with many falling back on the default position that they were indeed caused by the passage of carts. David Anderson went to Malta on holiday with his wife in September 2019, and visited and filmed at two of the major and still relatively intact such sites. In this film he demonstrates what he found at Naxxar Gap, which led him to propose a new theory. This is that they were deliberately carved in order to catch (scarce) rainwater and divert it down to settlements below, with an important supplementary role. This was to provide basins or ponds in which to grow suitable vegetables aquaponically, fertilised by cow dung and rotting waste. He suggests these were developed to grow vines of the Cucurbit family, such as melons, cucumbers and pumpkins; this would have converted otherwise useless barren ground into a special form of aquaponic arable land for growing both summer and winter vegetables.
Dr Anderson suggests that they were cut by neolithic Man using a ‘slide car’ hauled by a bullock. A slide car consists of two long sturdy poles kept parallel by a halter over the animal’s neck, and cross-struts lower down, weighted down with heavy stones, with sharp rock cutters fixed to their ends. Dragged along by the bovine he suggests they were used first to cut through the hard weathered limestone surface, to the softer unweathered limestone below. He suggests that in successive passages individual ruts were reamed out to different depths according to the complementary needs of water drainage to the villages and fields below, and with one of a pair leading into hydroponic culture basins or 'pondlets' in which the cucurbit vines, fertilised by dung, could grow and spread out over the adjacent limestone surface. The fact that at least one pair of ruts in Malta extends below the current sea level suggests that they may even extend back to the time of the last ice age.
4 дек 2019
