Able seafarers and hunter-gatherers: the story of the earliest human presence at Latnija Cave

Last April, the announcement of the results of archaeological excavations carried out at the Latnija Cave received acclaim for rewriting the narrative about the earliest human presence on Malta. This lecture will consider the evidence found by an international team of archaeologists working at Latnija since 2019, drawing on a suite of scientific analyses to identify the nature and extent of human activity in the cave. Results are allowing the researchers to consider the affordances of small island settlement in the Mesolithic and the ramifications of the longest sea crossings in the Mediterranean at this time.

Prof. Eleanor Scerri is an archaeological scientist based at the Max Planck Institute for Geo-anthropology in Germany, where she is the head of the Human Palaeosystems Research Group. Her research seeks to uncover the origins of our species, our global spread, and our interactions with the environment – with implications for present-day challenges. To do this, she combines archaeology with climate science, genetics and computational methods. She has authored over 75 publications on this subject, including in top scientific journals worldwide. In doing so, she has achieved global prominence for formulating the dominant models of recent human evolution and driving key breakthroughs.
In palaeoanthropology. Most recently, she is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded ‘IslandLab’ project, a 1.5 million euro project that is rewriting the prehistory of the Maltese Islands and, more broadly, the entire Mediterranean region. She has held positions at the University of Bordeaux and the University of Oxford before joining the Max Planck Society.

Nicholas Vella is a Professor in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta, where he joined in 1999. He writes on Mediterranean history and archaeology, with a focus on the ancient Phoenicians and the history of archaeological thought and practice. He has co-directed numerous excavations on multi-period sites in the Maltese Islands as part of research-led fieldwork, teaching, and student training. He is a Co-Investigator on the ‘IslandLab’ project, for which he co-directs the fieldwork at Latnija. He has been a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome, a Getty Villa Scholar in Los Angeles, and a Research Associate at the American University of Beirut. He has led the Department of Classics and Archaeology (2011/19) and the University of Malta’s Doctoral School (2017/25).