A group of nine St Edward's College students and some of their teachers gave up their Sunday yesterday to start cleaning up Skorba temples, in Mgarr.

The students, attending classes ranging from Year Six to Form Two, will be carrying out their own research on Skorba and will then try to create a website on the temples.

The exercise was carried out in collaboration with Heritage Malta and Din l-Art Helwa. The temples at Skorba were excavated under the direction of David Trump, then Curator of Archaeology, between March 1961 and September 1963 by the National Museum of Malta.

The excavations had revealed the remains of two adjacent temples.Prof. Trump says in his report on the excavations, "Skorba and the Prehistory of Malta", that the temples are of the well-known Maltese prehistoric type. The discovery and investigation had however also yielded for the first time a village of the temple period or earlier and a much fuller and better documented version of the prehistoric culture sequence.

He says Skorba gave not only the history of the gradual development of culture in Malta leading to the period of the temples but also a few hints on the baffling problem of how a civilisation could be swept away without trace until human bones were unearthed by the archaeologists of 4,000 years later.

Heritage Malta officer Mario Casha said that during the excavations, which discovered buildings ranging from the Ghar Dalam phase (5,300 BC) to the Bronze Age (2,500 BC), carbon dating was used for the first time.

Mr Casha, who led yesterday's exercise guiding the students in the clean-up, said Heritage Malta was trying to create awareness among school children. Other schools had already expressed interest in taking part in such exercises.

The Skorba site is closed to the public but visits are possible by appointment through the Museum of Archaeology. The site is cleaned annually but last year's cleaning was missed because of the restructuring resulting from the transition of the Museums Department to Heritage Malta.

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