XAGHRA STONE CIRCLE, Neolithic burial site on the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean Sea. Also known as the Xaghra Hypogeum or Brochtoroff Circle, it consists of a network of underground cave tombs surrounded by a stone enclosure. While the earliest tombs at the site date as far back as 4100 BC, the majority are from around 2900 to 2350 BC. It is one of the largest collective burial sites in Europe.
The practice of collective burial—in which large numbers of the dead are deposited in one place over an extended period—became popular throughout Europe during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic ages. Whereas burials had formerly been conducted in single, rock cut tombs, they were now carried out in tomb clusters and hypogea (interconnected caves). Of the three known hypogea on the Maltese islands, only the largest, Xaghra, has been excavated.
The Xaghra Circle lies on the southern edge of the Xaghra plateau, a mere three hundred meters from the Ggantija temple, which was built by the same civilization around seven hundred years earlier. The site, which contains two separate burial spaces, includes a partially demolished megalithic wall encompassing a rock-hewn tomb and a sizable underground chamber. Excavations conducted between 1987 and 1994 by the universities of Cambridge and Malta uncovered around 220,000 human bones and fragments—belonging to at least eight hundred individuals—alongside animal remains, pottery, and small pieces of figurative art.
Archaeologists can only speculate on the nature of the funeral rites that took place at the Xaghra Circle, but they appeared to involve the disassembling and rearranging of skeletal remains throughout the underground chambers.
Radiocarbon dating has established that the culture that built the temples vanished abruptly around 2500 BC, for unknown reasons. The funerary caves collapsed roughly five hundred years later and were not discovered until the late eighteenth century.