There are no documentary records for the temple construction, of course, so we don't really know why the Maltese people built the temples. In fact, archaeologists classify the massive stone structures as temples at all based on the presence of altars and offering bowls, the evidence for animal sacrifice and the ubiquity of 'cult' figurines.
In addition, there is no evidence that anyone actually lived at the monument sites--so they aren't elite residences--and burials are only associated with the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on Malta and the Xhagra stone circle (also called the Brochtorff circle) near Ggantija on Gozo. Further, those sites are mega-burials: reportedly, over 7,000 burials were discovered in the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. And other small underground tombs are scattered about the island; so it doesn't seem that the temples are monuments honoring the dead.
Why Do Archaeologists Think the Temples were Built?
Among archaeologists, Andrew Turnbull believes that the temples functioned as communal food storage--there was a storage facility called a quern found at Kordin); and that they also served as healing centers and places for the performance of space and knowledge. Colin Renfrew argued that the temples were administrative centers of redistributive chiefdoms-in essence, governmental palaces. Patton, Stoddart and Trump believe that the temples gave symbolic power to a priestly elite. Piggott and Anati (and Marija Gimbutas) argued that the temples were places for "mother goddess worship"; Gimbutas in particular believed that the temples were the center of a pan-European female-centered religion. Alasdair Whittle suggested that the temples reveal an increasing commitment to defined places; and Caroline Malone argued that the temples reflect a Maltese cosmology of life and death. John Robb (who details many of these opinions in his 2001 article) believes the temple construction had to do with creating an identity of isolation, separate from that of the mainland and Sicily.
The 'Uniqueness' of the Maltese Temples
It's important to recognize that, although the concentration of structures on Malta and Gozo are unique, some of the structures are not. There are standing stone circles in Sardinia (and in many other places of the world), and there's a hypogeum at Calaforno in Sicily that has 35 rooms and a smaller one at Malpasso. Neolithic Sardinians used underground room clusters to house the dead, ochre wall decorations and carved stone to mimic architectural elements such as pilasters and lintels. Also, many contemporary groups in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia also made figurines, and they don't look anything like one another.
But there's no doubt that the Malta temples were and are unusual, in their numbers, layout and, potentially, meaning.
Sources
See the Malta Temples bibliography for more information.
