Place · rock-art shelters · India
Isko & Hazaribagh rock art
The rock-art complex at Isko (Barkagaon, Hazaribagh district, Jharkhand) with Mesolithic to Chalcolithic paintings of hunting, dancing and tree-of-life motifs on sandstone walls. The site's distinctive feature is that the exact same iconography — triangular dancing figures, concentric circles, animal motifs — is still painted today by the local Kurmi, Oraon and Munda women on the mud walls of village houses for the Khovar (marriage) and Sohrai (harvest) festivals. The unbroken 10,000-year visual continuity between prehistoric rock art and living wall-painting tradition is one of the clearest surviving ethnographic cases of its kind.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Tradition
- Archaeological record
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.980, 85.360 (approximate)
Connections (2)
- Craft tradition ofSohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh
The Khovar and Sohrai painters of the Hazaribagh villages use motifs that also appear in the painted shelters in the hills above them — the same animal forms, the same filled geometric fields. Bulu Imam's surveys from the 1990s recorded both together. Nowhere else in India can a prehistoric and a living painting tradition be set side by side in one valley.
- AnalogueBhīmbetkā
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Hazaribagh rock art; Khovar and Sohrai painting
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