 that look at a different context. OK, again, just to reiterate what I said at the beginning of the session, I do have a stutter, so bear with me if I have a few hiccups along the way. But I went to talk today in the title Rock Up Toons of the Central Mediterranean region, and as you can see I've got a bit of a trend towards referencing articles that have been written in the past, and this is a bit of an old Two Roots 1972 article with this, but it's really trying to think about, again, in the spirit of EAA-25, what's really happened in the last 25 years when we think about Rock Up Toons, and coming from my background as a bioarchaeologist or trained as an osteologist, but very much an osteologist that pays quite a lot of attention to archeological context, so thinking about how people have thought about Rock Up Toons in terms of typology, in terms of context or their use of what's actually inside them, so all bones, basically, and then in terms of their chronology, and I guess sort of the outline of the talk will give a bit of a background about how Rock Up Toons have been discussed in the past before moving on to talk about chronology, so thinking about some of the general broader pictures and then moving on to a specific Maltese case study. So going back to what Rowan said about taking the personality test, in this sense, or at least in this talk, I have a bit of a split personality because I've been dating with both of those, and then trying to then talk about future directions. This paper also is sort of a bit of an initial exploration of why I've been really getting into the depth in my post-doc, or at least a facet of what I'll be working on in the next year and trying to explore it. So really in terms of what's going on, just the background to get people up to speed is that we have really the development and proliferation of Rock Up Toons, particularly in the fourth and third millennia we see alongside various other monument forms. I use the term monument very loosely, which covers central southern Italian peninsula and the surrounding islands. And although quite a lot of papers have explored and discussed Rock Up Toons, these are some of the core papers which over the years I think have really focused solely on Rock Up Toons and I think moved some of the discussions forward on that. And with regards to typology, well a lot of these discussions were initially rooted in diffusionism, so how Rock Up Toons might have been introduced from the eastern Mediterranean or surrounding ideas of architectural elaboration or cultural evolution, this is particularly the case in Malta with some of John Evans' work. And then in terms of context and use to actually watch inside the Toons, this is something which I think has been less explored. Indeed, people have thought and thought about artifacts in terms of actual human remains and how that might help us to think about the development of Rock Up Toons hasn't been explored as much, but some really important papers by Andrea Dolfini and some of the work of Rock Up Toons in Malta and excavations of sites like Selvageula in central Italy have really grappled with some of these ideas and I think are really useful for three months thinking about context and use. And then finally, chronology. This is something again which hasn't been done a lot, but indeed because some of the papers which you talked about, Rock Up Toons were written out of time before there was a lot of dates, but some of the ones which I tried to grapple with that was again, Ruth's paper in 1972 was definitely alluding to real coordinating and refuting the diffusionist idea. And then Hayden's paper in 2006 was introducing really championing this idea of local development or simultaneous development. So we'll be talking a little bit about this. And really over the last 25 years there's been a wealth of excavation where we have far better recording of these sites and many, many more new dates. And from our database that we've gathered together we have 256 dates for Rock Up Toons from across Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and the Italian peninsula. And that I think probably, I think that counts for something about 5% or 6% of our total new dates that we have for the entire future history. So to move on to talk about some of these more general trends, again, I'm not going to be necessarily, I'm not going to necessarily put, I see actually our, again, the bottom diagram hasn't come out, but that's fine. This is my fault, I broke the software. I knew what's wrong. It's not that important. Yeah, so as I already mentioned, Haydn's 2006 paper which would have developed this idea, or would not have developed but very much discussed this idea of simultaneous development of how Rock Up Toons developed one of these similar social and economic cultural circumstances is really, really interesting. And therefore I'm not so interested in the initial development of Rock Up Toons but more so what happens throughout the millennia and particularly with our proliferation and gradual development. And here in this top model, we can see all 256 dates modeled but then as we're also to get around sites which have been over-sampled, so sites where we have a lot of dates which might ensue the results, we also have all regions with one date per unique site phase. So this actually allows us to get around this idea of certain sites being over-sampled. And we can sort of see that we have this gradual proliferation in Rock Up Toons, but then there's a very interesting dip sort of towards the end, towards the end of the fourth millennium and then continued then proliferation. But what's really, really interesting, aside from that gradual pattern, this dip is actually something which we see in the radiocarbon record in all contexts. You just do generally see this dip at around about this time in the central Mediterranean. So a lot more sort of the flex overall activity pattern is perhaps sort of as opposed to being something specific to Rock Up Toons. But I think then what's really interesting as well is bringing it down by region, but whenever we do that, of course we then begin to be, we do begin to run into some problems and certain regions just don't have as much yet. So they're still really working on it. They haven't worked on it. So again, they're working on this, but they're not working on this. Are they on the, they're not on the screen? They're not even on the, they're working on my laptop but they're not working on it. Oh yeah, I could. Okay. I'll do that. I shall make it so. If you have any questions about the first part at all, PDF, I'm sure you can put it on. Do excuse these technical difficulties. Okay, super. Thank you very much. Okay. So getting back to. Yeah. Oh, no, no. Just press this. There we go. Okay. Sorry. So to get back on track. Yeah. So again, this, so again, this allows us to, again, begin to arrive at some of the overall trends of the use of rock tubes during the late Neolithic and Calvary. So very much during the 4th and 3rd millennia. It's been coming to their use in the Bronze Age. So after the Calvary and onwards, it gets a bit more complicated. But as well, bringing it down by region also is quite interesting what we do with this. Issues in central Italy, we sort of have this signal being of the initial and trip production. So thinking about this. So it's again, Andrea Duffy's work. The Pompis and Pietro group of the Fountain Archie groups who work around the world. We have this, lots and lots of early coverage rock tubes. These very, very dense sites. And again, these very new created centers of where we have lots of rock-cutting problems. So currently, we kind of get a bit of a window into this idea that we do have these earlier rock-cuttings of these hypergeos. Not exactly rock-cuttings, but again, sometimes we prefer to. So places like Fonte, sites like Fonte, Viva, where we have these again earlier Neolithic sites. We have this idea of this, not quite continuity. It's very much broken continuity, but a longer staggered tradition which we discussed. In Sicily, well, Sicily is always a bit problematical when we think about radiocarbon data. And we know that this middle coverage error, we know that there are certainly sites in use at this time. But again, this is really very much a signal without, you know, there aren't a lot of different sites at least published at the moment. But we do get this signal of the, the proto-A Neolithic tombs and places in the agrigento territory, which we'll come to later in the other talks, but then also the use of rock-cuttings in us, to the dual already Bronze Age phase. In Sardinia, it's also really interesting when we get these three peaks of activity. Again, we also don't have a signal of sort of the initial development of our rock-cuttings. So we know that there are dates from sites like Cuculu, Cuculu's Serio, which date to the, 4500 or so, which haven't been published, but we know that they're out there. But these three spikes are really, really interesting. I think are a bit of a signal of how these, whenever we get to the development of these larger Neolithic and then get these cycles of reuse throughout the coverage. And again, the phases of reuse of these sites, which I think is probably driving this very interesting signal, which we see. So there's just some of the sort of broader general pictures, which I think are really worthwhile drawing on. Now I'm going to move on to a, to sort of a, to this specific, I'm going to think of a Maltese Caspidia. Again, I'm very sorry for, this might look weird, but it's because it's on PDF and it was set up for animations. But trying to think about chronology and context and typology and the Caspidia of Malta, which is very much my background, never thinking about symptomaturing or theology. Well, quite a lot of the work, thinking about rock-cut-toons and Malta was very much based on this established system of architectural development, the sort of idea of, Evans idea of cultural evolution and ritual, ritual elaboration. We have these very simple, single or double chambered rock-cut-toons in the, in these sort of very important temple period, in these saboosh phase. And then as we come into the gigantia period, in the middle, late fourth millennium, we get the development of these low-gimbers and then by the end of the temple period, the Tarsian phase, we then get these elaborate hypergear. It's also worth noting that there are a few sites in Malta, so many of, so this model was based on, you know, a sample, one or two per, per site type, but again, this is very much the idea and something which was, again informing some of the broader ideas of the temple metatrain. But recent work over the last, over the last 25 years, but certainly, over really the last 10 years, it actually showed that the shem, the shem-shear-toons, which again, I've heard this linchpin of this architectural development, the dates which come from the shem-shear-toons really span the entire length of the temple period, which has really began to throw this idea of architectural development into the teal-smith. We also have the excavation of, of a Tarsian phase-toons, again, coming from the end of the Maltese temple period, the third millennium. We have this a, of a small double-shear-toon, which then shows us that we also have the use of smaller rock-toons alongside these larger height-height hypogeos, in cases like al-safriani, which again, are throwing this idea of this architectural development and this typological development into a bit of a teal-smith. So that's really some of how we can think about bringing together chronology and typology and transforming our idea of the development of rock-toons. Moving on to think a bit more about the context, and you can see that some people might be familiar with the site with the rock-toon the shower height pujib, which the initial publication in 2009 denoted to this Zabush phase, so sort of around around 4,000 BC and very much powered out to the Sicilian Sankoro Pianto Nottaro-toons in southern Sicily. And what was very interesting about this site is that it had a very large communal burial assemblage and this was something which was again parallel to the Sicilian site where you only had about one individual of each small tomb. So the idea that this early rock, this early rock-toon had a very large communal burial assemblage was argued as being an early expression of multi-fritual and our origin. We've now seen over the recent work and you can see this disgusted in the recent paper, that actually this tomb has been redated to the gigantea phase and instead of dating to the early 4th, millennium and even into the bit, the late 4th, millennium. And if you have that in mind, this larger communal burial assemblage is not as atypical as we thought. So again, you begin to see those larger kind of burial assemblages in other sites across the sample Mediterranean. So again, this is really sort of a case study, an example of how we can combine chronology, context and typology. I think it's really worth readdressing rock-toons across the entire central Mediterranean with this kind of combined approach. And whilst I would love to talk about the entire region, I couldn't possibly do it and I couldn't possibly do it in 15 minutes, which is why I was here already on multiple. And once formations are not unique to the multi-case study and indeed, it's centralically and it's sort of you'll be beginning to see that actually these new extubations can allow us to re-evaluate rock-toons. And there really is, at least I think, a need to think about this combined approach, combined approach of thinking about the depositions processes within the tombs. And then also just thinking about actually more after the initial introduction of rock-toons, what are the sort of long-term trends in their use. And then also pointing out some of those errors, such as subsistently inserting the word, there just hasn't been as much research pressure and what we do really need more more dates. There's been plenty of extubations, there's lots of material that we need more dates. And with that, I'd run out of time. I'd just like to say thanks to the funding panel. Thank you.