Recent Work in Corsica

Extract

Corsica is now, without any doubt, regarded in the Mediterranean as 'the island of statue-menhirs'. These Corsican monumental statues are 2 to 3 m. in heightwell above the size of a normal human beingand are the work of artists belonging to the last phase of the island's megalithic culture which we would date from the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. [I]: These statue-menhirs of which at least 60 are now known from all over the island, are almost all of a very hard granite: all were worked without the use of metal tools. Since the first publication of the important site of Filitosa [2] there have been many excavations, and we can now see clearly the succession of cultures in prehistoric Corsica, and particularly the succession and interrelation of the two important cultures which interest all prehistorians so much, namely the Megalithic Culture, that is to say the culture of the builders of the megaliths, and the Torrean Culture, that is to say the builders of the torre or stone towers. This latter, the civilisation torrknne as it is described in French, was entirely unknown in Corsica before 1954. The author has now excavated and studied ten sites of the Torrean cultures-cult-sites, fortified towers, and living sites-of which at least a hundred are known south of a line from Ajaccio to Solenzara [3].