A bear’s tooth, a bat’s bones and the remains of a bird, discovered in a forgotten shed at the prehistoric site of Għar Dalam, will go under the public’s lens on Friday.

Apart from learning about this discovery, people are being invited to assist Heritage Malta curators in cleaning palaeontological and archaeological material unearthed accidentally in 2017.

A shed’s doorway had been found during the clearing of prickly pears and giant reeds from around a rectangular stone structure just outside the entrance of Għar Dalam, senior curator, John Borg, told Times of Malta.

The vegetation was being removed as part of the entity’s efforts to replace alien and invasive species with indigenous ones in collaboration with the Environment and Resources Authority and Ambjent Malta.

The doorway led to an old roofless shed filled to the top with soil.

Upon receiving the go-ahead from the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage in February, Heritage Malta embarked on a controlled cleaning exercise where the soil was systematically removed and thoroughly sieved. The entire shed was cleared during a second campaign in summer.

It was difficult to figure out a precise date of when the material was dumped in the shed.

Excavations inside Għar Dalam started in 1865 by Italian naturalist Arturo Issel and continued almost uninterruptedly right up to the 1940s. Some minor excavations were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, with the last material to be excavated from within the cave being a pelvis and the lower jaw of a large hippopotamus at the end of the last century.

Mr Borg said the shed items cleaned so far mainly consisted of animal bone fragments, animal teeth and broken pieces of pottery.

Of particular interest was the tooth of a bear, another belonging to a medium-sized carnivore as well as bat and bird bones that still needed to be identified.

It is possible other material could be uncovered during the cleaning process, Mr Borg added.

Why are these particular remains so important?

“Some of the material discovered so far has shed light on obscure aspects of the cave’s history. There are still some gaps in our knowledge of the cave deposits, while some of the excavations had not been properly documented,” he said.

In the past, Mr Borg noted, excavations focused primarily on large, spectacular bones, such as those of elephants and hippopotami, discarding much of the smaller material such as that of birds, micro-mammals, amphibians and other micro-fauna.

From an anthropological aspect, the pottery fragments date to a time period that, so far, has not been recorded at the Għar Dalam site. The event on Friday will start with two short presentations about the Għar Dalam cave deposits and the archaeological excavation on the small shed there.

The presentations will be delivered by Mr Borg and David Cardona, another Heritage Malta senior curator.

This will be followed by a hands-on experience where participants will be divided in small groups to clean and sort the excavated material from the Għar Dalam shed. This will include cleaning, sorting, documentation, digitisation and packing.

Brushing Time will be held between 7 and 11pm at the National Museum of Natural History, in Mdina.

Log onto www.heritagemalta.org for more information.