Australia has long had a fascination with “Big” tourist attractions: the Big Pineapple, the Big Banana, the Big Merino (possibly popular with Kiwi tourists), the Big Gumboot (and Big Ugg Boots), even a Big Bogan.
Australia also has a, not just big, but colossal, naked warrior holding a stick. “Marree Man” is a mysterious, 2.7km geoglyph outline of an Aboriginal warrior, which appeared in the South Australian desert in the middle of 1998.
But not even Marree Man has a Giant Boner: leave that one to the Poms.
The hills of Dorset, England hold a giant mystery. There, someone at some point in history carved an enormous chalk figure of a naked man holding a club. Scientists are still puzzled about the why behind this drawing, but they believe they’ve answered the when.
No one knows who created Marree Man: no one has ever owned up, although theories vary from now-deceased Northern Territory artist Barius Goldberg, or Australian or American soldiers stationed at Woomera. Either way, we know exactly when Marree Man was created: satellite image comparisons show that it appeared between 27 May and 12 June 1998.
The Cerne Abbas Giant, though, remains a mystery on both fronts. But new research has narrowed the possible timeline, suggesting that it is far older than previously thought.
Based on recent chalk samples, researchers now believe that the Cerne Abbas Giant dates back to the Late Saxon period, some 700 years older than previously thought.
Mike Allen, a geoarchaeologist at Allen Environmental Archaeology in Codford, U.K., who led the year-long study on the hillside carving, said the results were “not what was expected.”
It has previously been assumed that the Giant was created just 300 years ago, mainly because no one ever seems to have noticed it before then.
Because a notoriously meticulous English cartographer named John Norden made no mention of the giant during his study of the area in 1617, some people have long believed that it didn’t yet exist. But Allen suggested that the site was merely covered with long grass.
To determine the giant’s true age, Allen and his team took soil samples from its chalk outline as well as from the soil nearby. Then, using a technique called “optically stimulated luminescence,” they determined when their samples were last exposed to sunlight.
They discovered that the oldest samples of chalk dated between 650 and 1310 A.D., and the soil around it dates to 700 to 1100 A.D. According to Allen, this means that the giant cannot be older than that, which puts the creation of it squarely in the latter part of the Saxon period which lasted from 410 to 1066 A.D.
The Anglo-Saxon period, Britain’s Dark Ages, was a dynamic and turbulent time. Britain was divided up into a dozen or so kingdoms, some significant, like Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, others barely more than ancient tribal groups. It wasn’t until at least the time of Alfred the Great’s grandson, Aethelstan, that England was united under one king (merging the rest of Britain into the United Kingdom took several more centuries).
England had undergone convulsive social changes in the centuries before and during its Dark Ages. The dozens of tribal groups were subdued under Pax Romana. The withdrawal of Rome’s legions was closely followed by waves of invasion: Anglo-Saxons and Danes. Each group of invaders brought their own cultures and gods to England. Bede, the great chronicler of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, complained that “the people of this island hold fast to nothing, but are ever ready for some new sensation”. Still, the ancient pagan beliefs were for long never far under the surface.
This led some to claim that the Cerne Abbas Giant was a pre-Roman fertility god. These new findings contradict that.
“The archaeology on the hillside was surprisingly deep – people have been re-chalking the giant over a long period of time,” noted National Trust senior archaeologist Martin Papworth.
“The deepest sample from his elbows and feet tells us he could not have been made before 700 A.D., ruling out theories that he is of prehistoric or Roman origin.”
Another theory was that the giant was a 17th century mockery of Oliver Cromwell.
But now that historians are more certain about the age of the Cerne Abbas Giant, they have new theories about why someone created it.
Allen noted that a Benedictine monastery was founded in Cerne Abbas in the late 10th century. He suspected that the naked giant might have been in response to that.“Some sources think the abbey was set up to convert the locals from the worship of an early Anglo-Saxon god known as Heil or Helith,” agreed Papworth[..]
Allison Sheridan, a freelance archeological consultant in Edinburgh, also believed that the creation of the giant likely had something to do with the new abbey. “It would almost seem to be an act of resistance by local people to create this fantastically rude pagan image on the hillside,” she said. “It’s like a big two fingers to the abbey.”
All That’s Interesting
While much of England was at least ostensibly Christianised during this time, the paganism that pre-dated even Rome persisted as a kind of sub-stratum for centuries. Even kings could observe the great Christian feasts, while hedging their bets with offerings to the old gods.
It seems, then, entirely possible that the common folk would show their continuing allegiance to old ways with a bit of rude graffiti.
Even in modern New Zealand, painting a dick on things is one way to put one up City Hall.
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