Tarxien is the most developed example of Malta's megalithic temple tradition and documents an early step architecture takes toward enclosed, shaped interior space — some six thousand years after Göbekli Tepe, yet still in the age of mortarless masonry.

The temples are built from semicircular chambers — apses — opening off a central corridor. Setting these chambers side by side gives the plan its characteristic "clover-leaf" or lobed form; this is not a freely growing village fabric but a pre-conceived, symmetrical plan typology. The walls are raised in two skins: tall upright limestone slabs (orthostats) on the outside, smaller coursed blocks stepped inward behind them. The upper courses lean gently inward, signalling an intent to roof the space by corbelling — the true arch and dome do not yet exist.

Tarxien also separates two uses of soft globigerina limestone: the rough load-bearing block and the finely worked, spiral-carved surface. The distinction between structural stone and facing stone thus appears early. On an island poor in timber and rich in stone, the Maltese temples are the most coherent early solution to the problem of building an enclosed ceremonial interior entirely in stacked stone; with the symmetry of the plan and the repetition of apses, architecture passes from fabric to typology.