 Today, we're going to be talking about some of our research of the shower hypogeum in the Maltese islands. Before I start, I'd like to quickly mention that I do have a stutter, which sometimes causes me to have breaks in my speech, so please bear with me on that. So late in the middle of Malta spans the period of about 3,800 to 2,300 BC. And this is the point in time when Malta takes a very divergent and unique archaeological course. At this time, we see the development of a very distinctive megalithic architecture, really sophisticated art, but also very complex mortuary sites. And this has previously been explained as either being the result of physical isolation, cultural insularity, or perhaps related to a strong island identity. But another very important question in the Maltese context is how did they manage to maintain this complex culture of megalithic building? Especially whenever we know that these people were up against increasingly difficult circumstances. And the redo carbon evidence, you can see here that the density models really reflect this sort of fluctuation in human activity on these difficult circumstances. So just talking about the shower hypogeum specifically, this is a large mortuary complex set within a natural cave system, which was then elaborated with megalithic architecture. And as they constructed this space, you can have, or rather, we see discrete areas and discrete burial places. And this is a map of the site and sort of shows you how these areas of dense burial activity, these dense combing burial deposits, which also act as structural deposits. So in terms of time, this stage of the site kicks off at around about 3,000 BC. But you can see that there's a peak of activity at around about 2,500 BC. So I'm going to be talking about our re-evaluation of the excavation archive whereby we digitize the contact sheets in GIS. And again, I emphasize the fact that we're dealing with these deposits of dense, disarticulated human remains. And I really want to impress here that my part of the talk is coming at this from a very much archaeological perspective. Comingal human remains are so sensitive to intentional and unintentional manipulation. And if you think about your average archaeological deposit, you have a matrix and a few bits of pottery. And that doesn't actually really tell us a lot. If we think about the deposits that we have on this site, you have your archaeological matrix that is round full of tiny little fragments of bone, each one sensitive to being moved either intentionally or unintentionally. So using that, comingal deposits actually become a really powerful indicator of site formation processes. So the area that we're going to focus on today is the shrine zone. And this is a part of the site where we have this large stone bowl and some other important architectural features, namely a megalithic sheen that runs around the site or that runs around the area. And what we have here is that we're going to do some density analysis so you can sort of see how there is changing expansion and contraction throughout the site's history. What's also really unique about this area is that we have, it's pretty much the only place in the cycle we have these really nice burial stratigraphy. And this section here also shows how this megalithic architecture is actually situated right on top of the human bones that are building these structures on top of the dead. So after the first placement of burrows, I don't know, about 2000 BC on the bedrock, we then get expansion of burial activity across the bedrock. But we also have the evidence for the first remodeling event where we actually see that they're actually cutting into the burial deposit to lay a foundation for one of these megalithic structures. Burial activity after that becomes very rapid so we get rapid deposition of human remains that build up within the area demarcated by this megalithic screen. But this rapid burial activity continues and we eventually see that actually burial activity overflows up around these existing structures which then prompts a secondary remodeling event whereby they have to rip out these megaliths and reposition them. So again, this sort of trend of expansion and contraction really again shows the power of thinking of coming on deposits as a whole as these really, really powerful indicators of site formation process. But also this process of continuous remodeling echoes what we see in above ground architecture where we also have these layers and this constant remodeling, this constant need to maintain this space and to sort of keep these sites in use and functional. And I'll pass on to Jess who's going to talk about more fine grained topony. Okay, so how do we interpret post-mortem interaction that the site? Well, I've been working on a tough economic analysis of a small sample of the remains. There's over 200,000 bones from this site and I've looked at maybe about 10% of the total assemblage but I think that the total assemblage is already a conservative estimate. Now, topony is really well placed in looking at funerary practices over time and one of the key methods I've employed is relative element representation. So this takes the minimum number of elements for each glitle element in the body and calculates it against the total number of expected elements if the minimum number of individuals in a context were to be present and fully represented. And what we can see here is that for sites with primary deposition such as spittle, fields and tenter, you get quite a high representation of most elements in the skeleton except for those with a lot of trabecular bone which are nearly always underrepresented. And then when we look at neolithic sites with really complex collective deposition, multiple forms of deposition happening in the same space, you get a really irregular and even unpredictable representation of all elements of the skeleton. And now ideally this model of element representation should be contextualized by looking at modification to the surface of the bone and also by looking at excavation records to try and pin down the particular types of funerary practices that we can see from the deposits. So this is what I've been looking at at the shower circle and what I've done is divided the skeleton into three main types of bones, long bones, the skull, cranium and mandible, and residual bones, so the small bones of the hand and feet and also of the axial skeleton. And I've taken the bone from each of these types which is represented highest and put it into this ternary plot. And what you can see is we've got some context with a really high curation of types of bones. So we've got cranial curation, we've got long bone curation. We've also got this cluster in the middle where most elements of the skeleton are quite evenly represented. And I don't think that this indicates complete articulated skeletons staying in the same place, not being disturbed, excavation records say otherwise. And in fact, what I think this is suggesting is that we've got multiple different types of practices happening in the same space which lead to some similar signature. This might be primary deposition but also different forms of secondary practices happening in the same space. And what I'd like to draw your attention to here is that where I've looked at specific areas with sequences over time, the dominant practices are also changing over time. And these contexts in red are what I think represent multiple depositional modes. And one of these is located in the shrine which I'm going to talk about a little bit more in relation to what Owen has just been telling you. So the two contexts from the shrine which I've looked at are 960, the overlying context, and 1206 in the middle. And in 1206, you can see that we've got fewer lower limb bones than upper limb bones and I think this represents selective removal of these elements to somewhere else in the site most likely. And this indication from the element representation model is also borne out by the excavation records and by looking at articulations in the laboratory. And then in contact 960, the overlying layer where the site is becoming increasingly crowded and requiring a lot of management in order to keep using this area because it's literally overflowing with bones. What we get is an overrepresentation of small bones of the hand and feet. You can see particularly here we've got a lot of metacarpals and metatarsals. One interpretation of this is that they could be selective dumps of small bones but I think that's quite unlikely. I think actually what's happening is that we've still got primary deposition continuing in this area but because it's literally overflowing with bone, what they're doing is removing the largest bones from the center of the site, pushing them most likely into the niches, into more inaccessible areas of the site in order to keep reusing the central area. And just to draw your attention to the last context here, 7.83 is similar to 12.05 and goes back to my point about this irregularity and low representation of elements as a result of multiple practices happening. So just to draw this together with the remodeling events that Owen's been looking at, similar practices are happening in the shrine over a long length of time but we see a decreasing number of individuals left in articulation. And what we see is a reduction of the body, the skull or the cranium being removed and the long bones being removed and occasionally the axial skeleton remains in articulation and then sometimes it's disturbed and the visibility of these practices is quite difficult to get at through the excavation records but I think it fluctuates over time as to whether they are disturbed or not and most likely also relates to these events of remodeling which Owen was just talking about. So what we've done here is tried to put together a multi-scaler analysis and I think this is quite important as it allows you to compliment a fine-grained understanding of the human remains which I've been doing through tephonomy and to contextualise it against the broader picture of what was happening in theolithic multirate this time. So the continuous remodelling mirrors what we've seen in the upstanding architecture, seen for example at Santa Bernat Temple which is nearby and this expansion and contraction of remodelling follows changing trends in the positional modes over time as I've just said but these remodelling events are interventions with the dead themselves, they are literally activating trenches into the deep deposit of human remains to uproot the megaliths, place them over the highest level and to keep reusing the centre of the site in the same way that they were doing before and what I found through tephonomy is that they don't seem to have been moving the bones outside of the site so I would argue that the remains of the dead formed a protected and respected resource within the site. Now whether you would like to call them ancestors or not I think that they were a powerful resource for the community and that managing the dead was really important to maintaining the use of the site over time and it overflowed towards the end of its use and what we've seen is that this is roughly contemporary with the radiocarbon dates for increasing environmental stress, degrading soils for example and whether this consistent elaboration and intensification of funerary practices indicates a persistence of place even in the face of this stress and perhaps is one form of response to this environmental stress. Thank you.