Journey
Megaliths & menhirs
Before there were cities in the south there were burials: dolmens, stone circles, urn fields, rock-cut chambers and menhir alignments, from the second millennium BCE into the early historic centuries. They are the largest body of prehistoric monument in India, almost entirely unprotected, and a few of them are still being worshipped.
Stops (8)
- The southern megalithic burial types · The burial types
Not one form but a family: dolmens of set slabs, cairn circles, sarcophagi on legs, Kerala's rock-cut chambers and umbrella stones, urn fields, and menhir alignments — each with its own distribution. They are where south Indian iron first appears in quantity, which is why the period is called the Iron Age here.
- Hire Benakal · Hire Benakal — the largest field
Hundreds of dolmens on a granite hill above the Tungabhadra, some of them man-high with a port-hole cut in one slab, together with rock paintings on the same outcrops — India's largest megalithic site, unfenced, and reached by a walk up from the village.
- Mudumal Menhirs · Mudumal — the alignment and the vermilion
Menhirs of three and a half to four thousand years ago in Telangana, some of them arranged on solstice sunrise lines, and still smeared with vermilion and worshipped by nearby villages as a goddess. It is the one site in this journey where the monument has never stopped being used.
- Brahmagiri · Brahmagiri — where the sequence was built
Wheeler's trenches here in 1947 established the stratigraphy that dates all of this — neolithic, then megalithic, then early historic, in measured layers with Ashokan-period material at the top. Every other megalithic site in the south is dated by reference to what was found in this one hillside.
- Adichanallur · Adichanallur — the urn field
A vast Iron Age urn cemetery in the Tamraparni valley with iron, bronze, gold diadems and inscribed pottery, excavated first by a German collector in 1876 and then by Rea in 1902 — and being redated, contentiously, on the basis of recent work that would push Tamil literacy substantially earlier.
- Burzahom · Burzahom — the northern outlier
Pit dwellings cut into the Kashmir loess, with a menhir alignment and a carved stone showing a hunt, and dog and wild-animal burials with their owners — a neolithic and megalithic sequence in the Himalaya whose affinities are with Central Asia and northern China rather than with peninsular India.
- Vangchhia · Vangchhia — the Mizo menhirs
A protected landscape of carved menhirs, terraces, water pavilions and burial sites in eastern Mizoram, surveyed only since 2016 — a monumental culture in the northeastern hills that is not in any standard account of Indian prehistory, and whose builders the local Mizo clans do not claim as ancestors.
- Dimapur Kachari Ruins · Dimapur — the Kachari pillars
Rows of carved monoliths, many of them mushroom-shaped and some over three metres, on the site of the Dimasa Kachari capital destroyed by the Ahoms in 1536 — a megalithic tradition running into the historical period, since these are sixteenth-century and their purpose is still argued over.