VALLETTA, MALTA—Analysis of deep grooves in the bedrock on the islands of the Maltese archipelago suggests that they are ruts made by the wheels of carts over thousands of years, Gizmodo reports. It had been suggested that the tracks dated to between 5200 and 750 B.C. and were related to quarrying activity. Joel Grima of the University of Malta said that similar cart ruts can be found in urban areas of Europe, Asia, and North America. In Malta, more than 2,600 tracks totaling more than 30 miles have been recorded. Most of the tracks are in clusters, and some of them resemble a connected railway network. Grima created digitized models of the ruts and considered other structures and formations around them. He suggests that many of the tracks can be dated from the Phoenician colonization of Malta, around 700 B.C., to the end of the Byzantine period, around A.D. 870. Grima thinks that the ruts span several cultural phases over \millennia, but may not be as old as previously thought. Read the original scholarly article about this research in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. To read about a Mesopotamian artifact found on Malta, go to “Written on Agate.”
