There they stand in the landscape, great, granite figures—some 13 feet tall and weighing up to 2½ 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 Collége de France (among his teachers: Abbé 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!"