We were very fortunate to welcome Mike Allen, a geoarchaeologist and environmental archaeologist who coordinated all the archaeological science for the Cerne Giant excavations. A link to the information we were given prior to the talk is here. I took photos of the slides Mike posted for us while he talked about the magnitude of the hill carving. At Bangor University in 1970, I was impressed with our rag week attempts to raise money for WWT when some students carved a panda into a local hillside. The link here lists later exploits for rag week. I have a lifelong interest in hill figures as a result of this early exposure to them.
Mike produced some very informative slides to help answer questions and elucidate what we now know about the figure after his research.
The Cerne Abbas Giant is found in Dorset, north of Weymouth and Dorchester and surrounded by archaeological sites
This slide showed how he's changed over the years, basically in 1908 the navel was incorporated into the phallus during a scouring operation, increasing it by 6 feet.
Apart from why this man was carved into a prominent hillside, there's also the question when was it carved and as you can see from the table, many people differed in their views
Above some handy stats
And a comparison with Wilmington Man in Sussex who isn't nearly as impressive is he?
There's clearly a book about the research available if you click on the link above
Even before the optically stimulated luminescence results, OSL, they discovered which snails were in the hill wash.
Interesting to see Ravilious painted both hill men, but gave the Giant a brown outline
I've enlarged the last slide for the conclusions because they are fascinating
