Place · rock shelter complex · India

Bhīmbetkā

Function

Archaeology & heritage

Tradition

Archaeological record

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

22.939, 77.612

Worth knowing

Found in 1957 by V. S. Wakankar, who saw the rock formations from a train window between Bhopal and Itarsi and got off to look. Some of the paintings are Mesolithic; villages nearby still practise things the paintings depict.

Connections (7)

• Astronomical alignmentMudumal Menhirs

  Mudumal's menhirs in Telangana, raised three and a half to four thousand years ago and aligned on solstice sunrises, are still smeared with vermilion and worshipped by nearby villages; Bhimbetka's shelters in the Vindhyas carry painting from the Mesolithic on, with cupules in the Auditorium Cave that may be far older still. Both are prehistoric readings of sky and land, and one of them has never stopped being used.

• Succession in timeBrahmagiri

  Bhimbetka's rock shelters were identified in 1957 by V.S. Wakankar, who had seen the hills from a train, and Brahmagiri's stratigraphy was published a decade earlier. The two mark the ends of Indian prehistory as a discipline: one gave a painted sequence running back to the Mesolithic and possibly much further, the other gave the framework of dated layers into which everything else had to fit.

• Succession in timeThe southern megalithic burial types

  Bhimbetka's painted shelters and the southern megaliths are the two great bodies of Indian prehistoric monument and they barely overlap in time or in kind: painting in rock shelters from the Mesolithic onward in central India, and stone burial architecture from the second millennium BCE in the peninsula. Where they do meet is at sites like Hire Benakal, where dolmens stand among painted outcrops — the same hill used for both, several thousand years apart.

• AnalogueIsko & Hazaribagh rock art

  Bhimbetka and the Hazaribagh shelters are the two places where prehistoric rock art and a living painting practice are found in the same landscape: village houses below Bhimbetka carry motifs that echo the shelters, and the Khovar and Sohrai painters of Hazaribagh use forms that appear in the rock art above them. Neither is proof of continuity, and both are hard to explain otherwise.

• Site adjacencyPachmarhī / Mahādeo hills

  Pachmarhi and Bhimbetka are the two central Indian shelter concentrations, a hundred and fifty kilometres apart on the Satpura and Vindhya ranges. Pachmarhi's hills also carry the Chauragarh Shiva shrine, where pilgrims still leave iron tridents on the summit, so the same massif has Mesolithic painting and a functioning Shaiva pilgrimage on it.

• AnalogueJogīmārā & Sitabenga, Ramgarh

  Jogimara and Sitabenga at Ramgarh put a painted cave and what may be India's earliest theatre space in one hill, with a second-century BCE Brahmi inscription about actors on the wall. Bhimbetka has the oldest marks; Ramgarh has the point at which marking, writing and performance appear together. The two sites are four hundred kilometres apart in the same Vindhyan belt.

• PrecursorAttirampakkam

  Attirampakkam and Bhimbetka are the two ends of the Indian Palaeolithic: a stratified handaxe sequence beginning around 1.5 million years ago in a Tamil river bed, and shelters in the Vindhyas whose cupules may be Acheulian and whose painting begins in the Mesolithic. Both were first recognised in the nineteenth century, and both have had their dates pushed earlier since 2000.

On these journeys

• Prehistoric rock art
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural

Sources

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters — UNESCO

• Wikipedia