The Giants of Santa Elena
Basic account
Giants said to have landed by raft on the Ecuadorian coast: the bones under the story are mastodon.
Account
In 1553 a Spanish chronicler wrote down what the Manta people told him about the giants who landed on their coast. Four centuries later, someone worked out what the bones were.
Motifs
- Bones offered as evidence
- Arrived by sea
- The people who came before
- Attached to a real place
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What is disputed
The ending is not Manta tradition.
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Sources
- Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú, 1553
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Session Prep
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Chain of custody
The giants who landed by sea at the Punta de Santa Elena were destroyed by fire that came down from heaven, a punishment the local people remembered and the Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote down in 1553.
The wording that carries this claim is documented in a printed chronicle of 1553, where the destruction sentence is introduced as something people say and the fire is attached to a charge of sodomy; the scholarship consulted here reads the fire and the angel as the chronicler's own framing, and the bones on the peninsula were being called animal rather than human by the end of the eighteenth century.
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