The long-awaited official report into the excavations of the Gozo Stone (aka Brockdorff) Circle in Xaghra – a unique underground prehistoric burial site near Ggantija temples – may have rewritten Maltese history in more ways than one: by failing to properly acknowledge that the site was originally discovered by Gozitan historian Joseph Attard Tabone, whose extensive research led to its precise relocation in 1965.

Edited by Caroline Malone – wife of archaeologist Prof. David Trump, who oversaw the initial excavations – the 521-page volume purports to be an exhaustive collection of articles and papers related to this unique underground Neolithic burial complex. Yet it was Attard Tabone who first alerted Trump to the discovery of three previously unidentified menhirs (standing stones) in a farmer’s rubble wall in 1959; and it was also Attard Tabone who later understood the significance of the find, recognising them as the only external remnants of a stone circle that had been described in historical writings, but subsequently lost.

Malone was unavailable for comment.