The Maltese cart ruts and their ‘lost civilization’ interpretations

Record summary

Malta and Gozo contain extensive parallel grooves cut into limestone, commonly called cart ruts. Their dating, function and relationship to prehistoric quarrying or transport have been debated, and late twentieth-century popular writers sometimes presented them as evidence of a vanished high-technology civilization or a flooded ancient landscape. The lead matters because the features are genuinely difficult to interpret, yet uncertainty about use does not establish extraordinary builders. Archaeologists have proposed transport, extraction and landscape-management explanations with varying degrees of confidence.