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Roger Grosjeanand the stone men of Corsica

Roger Grosjean atthe start ofexcavation in 1956

“There they stand in the landscape,great, granite figures – some 13 feet talland weighing up to 2 1/2 tons. Theirhollow gaze seems to follow the visitor;their enigmatic expressions changefrom minute to minute in the shifting sunlight.”

Thus starts an article in TimeMagazine, July 1968, about the “stonemen” – the sculpted prehistoric menhirs– of Corsica. The man who excavatedthem in the middle of the last century,Roger Grosjean, had a rather short butremarkable life that is now slowly beingrevealed. It is a life in which GreatBritain and British people played a role,in different ways and at different times.

Roger Grosjean was born in 1920 inChalon-sur-Saône, east central France,and spent his early years in the north,changing cities as his father, a judge,changed postings. He quickly showedinterest in sport and excelled in rugbyand athletics (he was the French discusrecord-holder in his age category). Buthis real passion was flying and in 1939 hejoined the French Air Force and trainedas a fighter pilot.

In the spring of 1943, in order to jointhe exiled Free French leader Charlesde Gaulle, he put together a riskystrategy: he told the Germans that hewould send them information if theyhelped him reach England. When heduly arrived, having gone through Spainand Portugal, he reported his coverstory and was asked to act as a doubleagent for the Security Service (mi5).Recruited by the Double Cross System,he took part in a deception operationaimed at the Germans concerning thelanding sites in France.

Grosjean was an agent for about ayear, codenamed Fido, and wascondemned to death by the Germanswhen they realised that he was workingfor the allies. It is only recently that thispart of his life has been uncovered,although mi5 has not yet released hisfile. Along with this activity, Grosjeanwas a member of the Free French AirForce and he did part of his advancedtraining at Caistor in Lincolnshire.While there, he discovered aerialarchaeology, which proved useful tohim later in life.

Grosjean had a difficult time after thewar. He tried his hand at various jobsincluding publishing and business, butnever got very far. He broke up from hisBritish wife, Sallie, whom he had met inEngland (she became a top model in

Paris, and then the first womanracehorse trainer and breeder in Italy).He spent all of his free time on his newinterest, archaeology, and he dug withthe French archaeologist l'Abbé Breuil,famed for his work on cave and rock art.He followed courses in Paris at theSorbonne and the Musée de l'Homme,and in 1954 he obtained a position at theCNRS (the French National ResearchCentre) and asked to be posted toCorsica. Nobody believed for a secondthat he would find anything of interest.

His first project was to survey therather sparse archaeologicalmonuments and menhirs that had beenfound over the years. This is whereanother British person entered his life.Dorothy Carrington, a writer who wasto become an authority on Corsicanculture and history, had visited theisland in 1948 with her husband, thepainter Sir Francis Rose. They wereshown four sculpted monoliths, two ofthem half buried, in Filitosa, a smallhamlet in south-west Corsica. She laterwrote in her book Granite Island(Penguin 2008, originally published1971), that she had a premonition thatthis was of great significance, but shedid not follow it up until Grosjeanarrived. The two of them went toFilitosa and examined the statuescarefully. They rolled one over and saw asculpted face with deep-socketed eyes,and a dagger carved on the upper part ofthe body. As she wrote aboutGrosjean's work, “Then began a time ofalmost daily discoveries – of dolmens,menhirs and statue-menhirs”.

As a trained archaeologist, RogerGrosjean knew what to look for andwhere to excavate. For instance, oneevening he was sitting on a rather largestone with the owner of the land,Charles-Antoine Cesari. Cesaribelittled Grosjean’s interest, saying hehad used the stone as a bench for some20 years. Nonetheless Grosjean had itturned over, and there lay what is nowone of the best known statue-menhirsin Filitosa, known as Filitosa V. Theface is outlined by a V, the nose andeyes are clearly marked, and on the bodythere is a dagger in its sheath and a long,vertical sword. This statue nowwelcomes visitors at the entrance to the site.

On another occasion, just beforegoing back to Paris, Grosjean wasintrigued by a spur covered in maquis,the distinctively Corsican dense,

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Fighter pilot, MI5 agent anddiscus-throwing record

holder: Roger Grosjean wasno ordinary archaeologist.

As François Grosjeanexplains, his discoverieswere equally distinctive

“Then began a time of almostdaily discoveries – of dolmens,menhirs and statue-menhirs”

Statue-menhir Filitosa V

state of evolution than any of themenhirs and statue-menhirs previouslyfound. It had eyebrow arches, almond-shaped eyes, and a projecting nose andchin. Dorothy Carrington, who saw it afew weeks later, characterised it as“astonishingly, disturbingly realistic”,with a likeness “of some formidablewarrior, some prehistoric Tamberlane”.

As for Filitosa IX, Grosjean thoughtit the megalithic masterpiece ofCorsica. It has a remarkable face in lowrelief, the skull is fully threedimensional, and the features areregular and symmetrical. Carringtontalks of a stately, aristocratic face, a faceof intimidating authority. As thesestatues were being aligned at the base ofF

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scrubby vegetation. The owner said thatthere had been an old convent there butwhen Grosjean finally worked his waythrough the trees, he found cyclopeanrocks clearly signalling an importantprehistoric fortified site. Itcontained a tumulus and apartly demolished tower.

When Grosjeanreturned in 1956, he hadthe maquis cleared awayand he startedexcavating the spur.Over the next fewweeks, numerousstatue-menhirs wereuncovered, many ofthem broken into twoor three pieces. Two stood out for theirremarkable beauty, Filitosa VI andFilitosa IX. The former came in threepieces. The head was complete and,according to Grosjean in an IllustratedLondon News article published thefollowing year, it represented a higher

I Stantarialignments

Statue-menhirFilitosa VI

The centralmonument at

Filitosa

Statue-menhirFilitosa IX

Statue-menhirsCauria IV (left) and

II (right)

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the central monument, Grosjean writes,the Corsican sun alternately accentedor diminished the shadows, giving themdifferent, almost human, expressions.

The reaction in the media, Frenchand international, was outstanding.Headlines proclaimed “An unknowncivilisation has been discovered inCorsica”, “The mystery of the stone-men”, “Enigmatic masterworks of 4000years ago” and “The brooding mastersof Filitosa”. In the years that followed,television crews arrived from France,Germany and England, andthe BBC spent an entireweek filming Grosjean'sexcavations. All this musthave been ratherhumbling for someonewho, only a few yearsearlier, was undecidedas to where his careerwas going.

He pursued hissearch for statue-menhirs atApazzu, Palaghju, Taravo andelsewhere, and excavated large stonemonuments similar to the megalithictower he had found at Filitosa. Hecalled these sites Torrean – based onTorre or tower – several of which he

excavated: Alo-Bisucce, Cucuruzzu,Torre, Tappa, Araghju and others, notto mention Filitosa’s.

Grosjean developed a theory which isworth expounding even though it hasbeen much debated (and some sayproved wrong). According to him, therehad been two distinct cultures presentat the same time in that part of Corsica,between 1500 and 1000bc, orthereabouts (archaeologists would nowsay nearer 2500–1500bc): theMegalithic culture and the Torreanculture. Members of the former, whobuilt the dolmens and menhirs, wereshepherds and goatherds who had areligion which included therepresentation of human beings, eitherthemselves or their enemies. The finelysculpted statue-menhirs portrayed theTorreans with their weapons andequipment, maybe in the hope ofcapturing their strength and magic.

The Torreans, on the other hand,were skilled in war and navigation (theyhad arrived on the island morerecently), and it is they who built thecyclopean fortified monuments as wellas cone-shaped cult and living sites.Contrary to the Megalithic builders,they never represented the humanfigure in their art.

The two cultures clashed repeatedlyand when the Torreans won, which theyoften did as they had bronze weapons,they took over the Megalithic sites,broke the statue-menhirs and reusedthe fragments in their new fortificationsand cult monuments. Filitosa was one ofthe sites which had been taken over bythe Torreans, hence the broken statue-menhirs in the central tower.

There remained the question ofwhere these Torreans had come from.Grosjean found his answer when hestarted working on the Cauria plateauin 1964. It is as rich as the Filitosa sitealthough more spread out. There aretwo alignments of menhirs as well asdolmens. The I Stantari alignment sitewas cleared of maquis and the wall inwhich menhirs were incorporated wasdisplaced. The excavation revealed twoimpressive statue-menhirs: Cauria IIand Cauria IV.

In an article written for Antiquity in1966, Grosjean noted the strongsimilarity between the features on thesestatues and the relief at Medinet-Habuin Egypt depicting one of the SeaPeoples, the Sherden or Shardana. Thestatue-menhirs had lateral holes on the

tops of their heads that had probablyheld horns, short swords in a scabbardslung from the shoulder, a loin cloth orgirdle carved around the statue andother details. Grosjean concluded thatthe Torreans were in fact the Sherden.He pursued his work for several moreyears on some 30 sites in all.

In the summer of 1975, at the heightof his career and while working on hisnew museum in Sartène, RogerGrosjean died of a heart attack; he wasonly 55 years of age. In a bit more than20 years of research, he had contributedto making Corsica one of the mostexciting archaeological areas in theMediterranean. And yet, as he said inthe interview he gave to TimeMagazine, “I have only scratched thesurface. There is enough digging here tokeep ten full-time archaeologists busyfor the next 200 years.” Renown cameto him after death. He is nowrecognised as one of the founders ofmodern Corsican archaeology.

See Roger Grosjean’s “Recent work inCorsica”, Antiquity 40 (1966), 190–98 andLa Corse avant l’Histoire (Klincksieck1966); and “FIDO: French pilot andSecurity Service double agent malgré lui”, byFrançois Grosjean, International Journal ofIntelligence & Counter Intelligence 23.2(2010), 337–52. The author is professoremeritus at the University of Neuchâtel,Switzerland. His book on his father, RogerGrosjean: Itinéraires d'un Archéologue, waspublished by Alain Piazzola in 2011

Roger Grosjean as a youngFrench Air Force pilot

The Torreanmonument at Alo-Bisucce

Filitosa V today