Place · megalithic site · India
Hire Benakal
The 390-hectare megalithic site at Hire Benakal in Koppal district, Karnataka — India's largest megalithic funerary complex, with over 1,000 standing dolmens and cist burials of the first millennium BCE (c.800-200 BCE). The dolmen chambers were used for primary and secondary burials of the Iron Age Karnataka communities. The site also holds rock paintings in red ochre showing hunting scenes, dancing figures and bulls alongside the dolmens — the transition between the painted-shelter prehistoric and the megalithic early-historic layered on one landscape. The site was scientifically excavated by K.P. Rao of the University of Hyderabad from 2008. UNESCO tentative list since 2017. Hire Benakal is 50 kilometres from Hampi.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.400, 76.150
Connections (3)
- In the same set asBrahmagiri
Hire Benakal, on a hill above the Tungabhadra, is India's largest megalithic site — hundreds of dolmens of the first millennium BCE with rock paintings alongside — and Brahmagiri is where Wheeler established the sequence that dates such monuments and connects them to the neolithic before and the early historic after. The Deccan megaliths are the archaeology of the people the Ashokan southern edicts were addressed to.
- Site adjacencyOnake Kindi
Hire Benakal's dolmen field and the Kappagallu or Onake Kindi rock-art hill sit within about eighty kilometres of each other in the Tungabhadra granite country, and both belong to the same long neolithic and megalithic occupation of that landscape — the ash mounds, the bruised bull paintings, the dolmens. It is the densest prehistoric landscape in southern India and it is the one Vijayanagara was later built in the middle of.
- In the same set asMudumal Menhirs
Hire Benakal's several hundred dolmens and Mudumal's eighty menhirs are proposed as a serial megalithic nomination, two hundred and fifty kilometres apart in the Deccan. Neither has been systematically excavated, and at both the interpretation has run ahead of the fieldwork — a necropolis at one, a solstice alignment and a star map at the other.
On these journeys
Sources
List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia
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