Stone Men of Corsica

There they stand in the landscape, great, granite figures--some 13 feet tall and weighing up to 2 1/2 tons. Their hollow gaze seems to follow the visitor; their enigmatic expressions change from minute to minute in the shifting sunlight. "When you look at one, you know it represents someone--someone to whom you could give a name," says Archaeologist Roger Grosjean, 47, the man responsible for bringing the monuments to light. Corsica's sculptured menhirs (from Breton men-stone, and hir-long) are among the oldest monumental statues in Europe. Says Grosjean: "For the origin of sculpture, these monumental figures are as important as the cave drawings of Lascaux and Altamira are for the origin of painting."

Grosjean first became interested in Corsica while studying at the Sorbonne and the College de France (among his teachers: Abbe Henri Breuil, the "pope" of prehistory). When he began prospecting for a dig of his own, he remembered that Corsica's prehistoric art had been written off as "very crudely sculpted" while Sardinia, only seven miles away, had yielded a rich crop of 7,000 monuments.

Imagined Suspense. It took Grosjean just one trip, in 1954, to discover that the Corsican menhirs, which had been known to natives for as long as anyone could remember, were "in fact finely sculpted works of art, but no one had taken the trouble to take a good look at them." Nor were casual visitors to blame. Most menhirs were buried deep in the maquis (brush), some of them face-down or savagely hacked into two or three pieces. Describing his most important find, a 160-ft. hillock with 17 sculptured menhirs at Filitosa, he says: "It was an amazonian jungle. We crawled up it like foxes. Suddenly, I found myself nose to nose with a prehistoric statue. Imagine the suspense!"

Imagine also Grosjean's bafflement when he found, from carbon-14 tests and other data that the menhirs belong to the period 1400 B.C. to 1200 B.C.-- at least seven centuries before the golden age of Greece or the Etruscans. Earlier neolithic sculpture is totemic in nature, but Corsican menhirs, Grosjean noted, are "realistic and naturalistic, not stylized like Egyptian statues, and not divinities." To account for them, Grosjean has had to reconstruct an obscure artistic period. His starting point was a mysterious Mediterranean "People of the Sea," who left dome-shaped temples on Corsica, Sardinia and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Identified as "Shardanes," they appear on an 1190 B.C. bas-relief in an Egyptian temple in Medinet Habu wearing horned helmets (the Corsican menhirs have helmets with holes that may have once been filled with horns). A likely conclusion: the Shardanes built the menhirs. Scratching the Surface. Elementary but wrong, decided Grosjean. Why would the Shardanes cut up their own monuments? Why would they sculpt menhirs on Corsica when they had not done so elsewhere? Grosjean hypothesized that he was dealing with a native Corsican people who had been at war with the Shardanes. The Shardanes had won, and hacked up the menhirs in retaliation. Grosjean suspects that the native Corsicans created replicas of their enemies, in hopes of capturing the invaders' magic. They may be the ancient people described by Aristotle, who "raised about their tombs as many obelisks as the dead man had killed enemies during his lifetime."

The prehistoric Corsicans evidently failed to stop the Shardanes, for many menhir fragments are embedded in the walls of Shardane temples. Still, they made gigantic strides in sculpture. Their earliest attempts (around 1800 B.C.) had simply a head separated from the body by a crude neck; their final works depict arms, hands, and what look like facial traits. Most remarkable of all, they were apparently laboriously carved with round, white quartz tools. Nor is their final reckoning complete; Grosjean discovered altogether 72 carved menhirs, of which 30 were finely sculpted. Says he: "I have only scratched the surface. There is enough digging here to keep ten full-time archaeologists busy for the next 200 years."

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