Rome, May 14, 2021 – Il giant of Cerne Abbas it is the most famous of the enormous ones plaster figures carved into the hillsides d’England. Portrays a naked man 55 meters tall, holding a club in his hand and displaying an erect penis in plain sight. Its origin and its age are the subject of the most disparate speculations, for example whether it is a prehistoric engraving, or a portrait of Hercules from the Roman era, or that it was made in the seventeenth century as a mockery to Oliver Cromwell, military and puritan statesman who would certainly not have liked the remarkable foul. None of this: a new one study of archaeologists of the National Trust may have solved the mystery, determining that the giant dates back to the times of the Saxons, at the turn of the Early and Late Middle Ages.
A discovery that scholars define exciting, because it contradicts previous theories and tells a very different story. To reach this conclusion, they analyzed with cutting-edge techniques some samples taken from the deepest layer of the furrows that outline the figure. The fragments were found to be datable to a varying period from 700 to 1100 after Christ, precisely during the domination of the Saxons.
“The hillside archeology was surprisingly deep,” says archaeologist Martin Papworth; “People continued to reconstitute the plaster of the giant for a very long time. Samples taken from the shoulders and feet tell us that the figure could not have been made before 700 AD, thus excluding the theories that assign it prehistoric or Roman origins “.
However, the researchers found themselves faced with another enigma. More recent samples can be dated to 1560, but the first written attestation of the existence of the figure is found in a document of 1694. Is it possible that no one has mentioned it before, as if the giant did not exist? The hypothesis is that, for reasons still unknown, the giant has fallen into oblivion for centuries: “It may have been covered in grass and therefore forgotten,” says Papworth, “At some point, thanks to the signs that could be seen in conditions of low sunlight, people he noticed the figure on the hill and he decided to restore it. “This would explain why the historical memory of the area is not mentioned in the documentation of the nearby abbey.
The research has allowed to define a more precise time frame for the birth of the giant of Cerne Abbas, but more studies will be needed to further narrow it, establish how it has transformed over time and understand if the lost years theory is correct. We know him a little better now, but the giant still retains a certain aura of mystery.
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