Tradition · burial architecture tradition
The southern megalithic burial types
A family of forms rather than one: the dolmen or kist of slabs set as a chamber, the cairn circle of stones around it, the sarcophagus on legs, the rock-cut cave of Kerala, the urn field, the menhir alignment, and the umbrella stone — each with its own distribution across the peninsula.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 14.000, 77.000
Worth knowing
The burials are where south Indian iron first appears in quantity, which is why the period is called the Iron Age here, and they contain black-and-red ware, horse furniture and occasionally Roman material in the latest graves — so the tradition runs right up to the moment the Tamil country enters written history.
Connections (2)
- Succession in timeKeeladi
The latest megalithic burials contain black-and-red ware, iron, horse furniture and occasionally Roman material, which puts them alongside the first Tamil urban sites — Keeladi on the Vaigai, Kodumanal, Arikamedu. The graves and the towns overlap for a century or two, so the megalithic tradition runs right up to the moment the Tamil country enters written history, and the graffiti-marked sherds that the Tamil-Brahmi argument turns on come from exactly that horizon.
- Succession in timeBhīmbetkā
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Megalith”. Mortimer Wheeler’s Brahmagiri report, Ancient India 4 (1947); K. Rajan and the Archaeological Survey of India megalithic surveys.
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