Hunters-gatherers and the earliest farmers co-existed on both sides of the Gozo channel. This exceptional fact is elaborated in the newest booklet by the two familiar authors of Inanna Publishers. In this lecture, Veronica Veen and Adrian van der Blom will explain how they were inspired by the surprising Mesolithic finds in the Latnija cave near Ċirkewwa to re-assess their field notes from around 1990. A site near Qala, opposite the Latnija, yielded groundbreaking results: Mesolithic artifacts and the very earliest Neolithic material. The early Neolithic story has already been extensively dealt with in The First Maltese books, published in 1992 and 2022. Veronica Veen’s The Goddess of Malta (1992) gives a picture of Malta’s entire Neolithic culture, including its imagery and symbolism, with an additional essay in the 2019 republication on the controversial goddess concept. In 2023, Veen published Malta’s Temple Culture Summarised in the Twin Ladies of the Xaghra Circle. On the threshold of her 40th year of cultural anthropological fieldwork on Gozo, especially among women, she will briefly dwell upon her other books in this field, including Female Images of Malta (1994).

All titles will be on special offer at the venue.

Inanna PublishersInanna is an idealistic and prolific publisher of scientifically based books and articles, always for a wide interested audience, on Malta’s prehistory, especially that of Gozo, since 1992 already 10 titles now, among which two books The First Maltese and one about the Temple Culture. Next to this, women’s history and the women’s storytelling tradition are cherished subjects, like in Female Images of Malta and The Maltese Cinderella. Two of these books were awarded a grant from the National Book Council via the Malta Book Fund.