WULO Special Sharing Session | Prehistoric Churches in Malta - Prehistoric Archaeology, Anthropology and Architecture

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Theme of the sharing session

Prehistoric Churches of Malta - Archaeology, Anthropology and Architecture of Prehistory

Speakers: Cheng Jiazhen

time: Saturday, January 14, 3pm

Admission: 12 Euros (including drinks, free for members)

Location: 43 Boulevard Haussmann , Wulo life

Lecture Introduction:
Prehistoric Churches of Malta - Archaeology, Anthropology and Architecture of Prehistory

Malta is a small Mediterranean island that combines modern tourism, Christian culture and prehistoric relics. In the late Neolithic period (from 4000 BC to around 2000 BC), a series of megalithic prehistoric buildings appeared on the island, which consisted of temples and underground palaces belonging to the above-ground and underground worlds.
We know that these prehistoric buildings did not appear suddenly. In the Paleolithic Age, which lasted about millions of years, humans had accumulated rich construction experience: caves in southern Europe and bone houses in the Siberian ice sheets. After the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago), also after the so-called "Neolithic Revolution", megalithic buildings began to appear: from Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia to temples all over Malta. Here, architecture seems to have undergone an "evolution" process from underground to above ground.
However, Malta's prehistoric architecture raises a question among many cases: why did the Maltese prehistoric people "return" to the underground world tens of thousands of years after the caves of Lascaux and Altamira in the Upper Paleolithic, on the eve of the birth of writing-bureaucracy-state organization among the Sumerians? Does this still mean that the Maltese had a developed division of labor and a hierarchical political organization, so that they could undertake the engineering tasks of building giant buildings? However, does cave painting necessarily require social stratification? Were there professional artists among prehistoric people? ... Finally, if prehistoric pre-architecture constitutes a beginning in the eyes of modernist architects, what kind of relic will architecture in modern society become in the future?
In this lecture, the combination of archaeology, anthropology-sociology, and philosophy will be necessary to help reveal the other possibility that always exists in human society.


Speaker: Cheng Jiazhen
Born in 1994 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, he is a doctoral student in philosophy jointly trained by Fudan University and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His main research areas include modern and contemporary French philosophy, anthropology-sociology, and philosophy of biology.
He has published many papers in important journals and translated Derrida's "Spurs: Nietzsche's Style" (East China Normal University Press), Baudrillard's "Interviews" (Shanghai People's Publishing House), "Bataille's Collected Works" in four volumes (Baidea, to be published), and Pierre Crasters' "Society against the State" (Commercial Press, to be published).