mills were used may have been wild and not
cultivated. No grain of any kind has been found in the Maltese
settlements.

The megalithic race do not seem to have been great traders. This is
remarkably exemplified in Malta, where there is not a trace of
connection with the wonderful civilization which must have been
flourishing so near at hand in Crete and the AEgean at the time when the
megalithic temples were built. The island seems to have been entirely
self-sufficing, except for the importation of obsidian, probably from
the neighbouring island of Linosa. Of copper, which wide trade would
have introduced, there is no sign.

Some writers, however, have argued the existence of extensive
trade-relations from the occurrence of a peculiar kind of turquoise
called _callais_ in some of the megalithic monuments of France and
Portugal. The rarity of this stone has inclined some archaeologists to
attribute it to a single source, while some have gone so far as to
consider it eastern in origin. For the last theory there is no evidence
whatsoever. No natural deposit of _callais_ is known, but it is highly
probable that the sources of the megalithic examples lay in France or
Portugal.

It would of course be foolish to suppose that the megalithic people
received none of the products of other countries, especially at a time
when the discovery of copper was giving a great impetus to trade. No
doubt they enjoyed the benefits of that kind of slow filtering trade
which a primitive tribe, even if it had wished, could hardly have
avoided, but they were not a great trading nation as were the Cretans of
the Middle and Late Minoan Periods, or the Egyptians of the XIIth and
XVIIIth Dynasties. We know nothing of their political conditions, of the
groups into which they were divided, or the centres from which they were
governed. That there were strong centres of government is, however,
clear from the very existence of such huge monuments, many of which must
have required the combined and organized labour of large armies of
workers, in the gathering of which the state was doubtless strongly
backed by religion.

We have seen that the megalithic peoples frequently dwelt in huts of
great stones. Yet in the majority of cases their huts must have been,
like those of most primitive races, of perishable material, such as
wood, wattle, skins, turf, and clay. As for their form there was
probably a continual conflict between the round and the rectangul