For nearly 300 years, the Knights of St John forced a range of captives to labour on their galleys, with slave, convict and debtor oarsmen propelling the Knights’ navy in their crusade against Islam. This article considers how we can investigate these captives and the consequences of their presence in Malta by reconfiguring captivity as a process that extended into wider society. By seeking material traces of captivity at sea on board galleys and on land, the article opens new investigative avenues into early modern captivity in the Mediterranean. In addition, it brings to current debates a rare archaeological example of modern slavery within a European context.

Since so little is still known of the marine prehistoric environment, present management actions tend to be guided by the gathering of disparate sets of data obtained as part of regulatory practice and/or from opportunistic finds that are not necessarily specifically targeted towards archaeology. Our view is that we need to develop a clearly defined set of questions about the marine prehistoric cultural resource to enable the design of targeted scientific research, as part of both the regulatory process and marine management generally. In this paper we argue that it is crucial to understand both natural and anthropogenic context, and this necessarily includes work on the Quaternary geology. Furthermore, we argue for a greater regulatory emphasis on identifying and initiating what we should do (for the long term) rather than what we can and are doing (for the short term) to identify the best means to manage the prehistoric marine environment.