Material Expressions of Social Memory: A Contemporary Archaeology of the Great Siege Monument and the Spontaneous Shrine to Daphne Caruana Galizia in Valletta, Malta

In October 2017, the Maltese journalist and anti-corruption activist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated by a car bomb. Within days, the first objects that would become the Daphne memorial appeared at the foot of the Great Siege Monument in Valletta, which commemorates the siege of Malta by the Ottomans in 1565. Since 2017, these two contrasting entities have clashed and coalesced in unexpected ways. This paper explores the material and symbolic interaction between the monument, which was unveiled in 1927, and the spontaneous shrine that appeared ninety years later. It employs a multitemporal approach to investigate the heritage space through two “timelines”, one concerned with the history of the monument and the other with the memorial. Drawing from González-Ruibal’s interpretation of “parataxis”, the study argues that the juxtaposition has created a palimpsest that can be called a “monument-memorial”. By engaging with contemporary archaeological themes, it is suggested that the palimpsest shares characteristics consistent with James Young’s model of “counter-monumentality”.