LOWER PALAEOLITHIC ROCK ART OF INDIA AND ITS GLOBAL CONTEXT (original) (raw)
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Indian Pleistocene rock art in a global context
The incredibly early petroglyphs reported from central Indian quartzite caves immediately raise the issue of the compatibility of this information with our knowledge from the rest of the world. It is demonstrated that, with the exception of the presumably greater antiquity of the Indian finds, they are fully consistent with what five continents have yielded. The Indian sites offer numerous cupules and a very few linear grooves; the oldest forms of rock art from Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas comprise precisely the same forms of petroglyphs, and even the subsequent traditions are almost identical. This is demonstrated with the earliest known examples of rock art from those continents, and is partly attributed to the taphonomy of rock art. Rock paintings, similarly, are limited to regions where deep limestone caves were used by Pleistocene hominins, evidence for which is so far only available from two continents. Even the earliest known indications of portable palaeoart from India are entirely consistent with other continents.
C h a l l e n g i n g t h e t e n e t s o f m a i n s t r e a m s c i e n t i f i c a g e n d a s: Man of the Old World trotted in Delhi, India, far earlier than the science communities have yet to admit. The Aravallis hill-ridges within Delhi region, where previously unrecorded rock art petroglyphs have been explored, the vivid creations are witnessed in the open-air-landscape. These are all intended creations. Hence, these do contain human history and do represent biological, and ecological relationships interwoven with the then existing paleoenvironment. The further study will reveal, what we call "art work" in the rock beds of Aravallis has a relationship between the Old World and what has been explored in Delhi, India. "
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF LOWER PALAEOLITHIC INDIAN PALAEOART
This paper begins by reviewing the art-like productions currently known from the world's Lower Palaeolithic period. In order to place the evidence known from India into this context, it then describes the available Lower Palaeolithic evidence from that country. It also reviews the Lower Palaeolithic hominin occupation evidence from India in some detail.
Journal of Historical, Archaeological and Anthropological Studies, 2023
The present paper briefly discusses the results ofrecent investigations carried out in the Debrigarh-Lohara massif located in the northern Bargarh uplands of Odisha, which brought to light three new rock art sites. The most significant characteristic features of these newly discovered rock art sites are, absence of petroglyphs, ceramics, and use of bi-chrome as well as polychrome techniques in the art representations, and presence of monochrome pictographs executed by purple red pigment and represented mostly by naturalistic wild animal and anthropomorphic forms, besides a few design patterns. The habitation floor of two rock art sites out of three yielded evidence for microliths including geometric forms, besides a few used red ochre pieces. On circumstantial grounds, taking into consideration microlithic assemblages from stratified and dated open-air sites located nearby the Debrigarh-Lohara massif, a Late Palaeolithic time bracket for the pictographs of the newly discovered rock art sites has been suggested.
The difficulties of determining the approximate antiquity of Lower Palaeolithic petroglyphs in India
The EIP Project has produced unambiguous evidence of Lower Palaeolithic petroglyphs in the excavations at Bhimbetka and Daraki-Chattan in central India. In order to obtain absolute dates, efforts have been made, through IFRAO and involving Indian and Australian scientists, to meet the challenge since 2001. We have tried OSL dating of the sediments from the excavated sections at both sites, AMS 14C dating of amorphous silica, U-Th series dating of ferromanganeous accretions deposited on petroglyphs and stratified boulders and microerosion dating of cupules. We encountered a variety of problems while employing these methods and could not obtain satisfactory results. We are also exploring the potential of using the 26Al-10Be cosmogenic radiation method to date sediments obtained from the excavations of Lower Palaeolithic strata yielding exfoliated petroglyphs at Daraki-Chattan. The paper deals with the problems faced and the taphonomic issues encountered in this project.
2010
Daraki-Chattan in the Chambal basin is the richest known Pleistocene cupule site in the world. Here excavations were conducted by the Rock Art Society of India in collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India under the EIP Project for five seasons from 2002 to 2006. The excavations established that the site was in use mostly in the Lower Palaeolithic. The excavations also yielded twenty-eight cupules on exfoliated rock slabs, two still lying in the trench, and ten hammerstones from different levels of the excavated sediments right from close to bedrock. Besides, a stone block bearing two linear petroglyphs was discovered from layer three. The paper presents the contextual study of the cupules and hammerstones excavated from this site.
2010
India has produced sufficient evidence of late late-Pleistocene art, mostly in the form of mobiliary art objects. Archaeologically they are associated with an Upper Palaeolithic industry. Besides, there are some simple forms of petroglyphs and early form of dynamic dancers and animals in rock paintings. These, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, can also be assigned to that period. Thus, the late late-Pleistocene art of India presents the beginning of motif development, creation of design and ultimately that of animal and human forms. Ultimately it laid the foundation for the rich and varied tradition of Indian rock paintings in the following period. The tentative time span of Upper Palaeolithic in India is 40,000 to 10,000 yrs BP.
Central Indian rock art is long known for its exceptional rock paintings; depicting crucial stages of human evolution in the subcontinent. The inception of its discovery was initiated by Carleylle from the Mirzapur region of Central India during the latter half of nineteenth century, the process continued till today. During the first part of the twenty first century a plethora of rock art site shave been discovered in India; particularly in Central India. It is relevant to mention here that the dataset is diverse and each rock art site has certain unique elements that other sites do not represent in their morphic record. However, the variations of the morphic details and nature of their occurrences in different rock shelters and even within the same group of rock-shelters have not been explored yet. The methodological rigor and sound documentation techniques brought to light several new sites in the region during a field survey of nine months between 2010 and 2012. New discoveries of painted rock-shelters enhanced the total number of archaeological sites found in the given region, but also this poses new challenges for the preservation and conservation of the archaeological sites for future research and posterity. This paper details a few new discoveries in the districts of Mirzapur and Rewa discussing their present and future importance in rock art research and archaeology in Central Indian context.
2009
In 2003, as part of a program of archaeological survey in the southern part of Kurnool District in Andhra Pradesh, south India, a series of previously unreported rock art sites were recorded. These primarily consist of pictographs, painted onto the walls of quartzite rock shelters and boulders. They appear to cover a range of time periods from the present day and potentially extending back into the Pleistocene. This paper presents the results of the research undertaken by the authors in Kurnool district of Karnatak.
This paper reviews rock art research conducted between 2010 and 2014 in India. Its goal is to summarise rock art research over the past five years in the region, and identify some common themes in rock art studies. Unfortunately, this review cannot be exhaustive due to the difficulties of accessing much of the literature on the topic that is produced and published in South Asia, but is not widely distributed beyond the region and is not readily available on the internet. As a result, inclusion within the review primarily relates to accessibility to peer reviewed and published sources. A number of overviews of rock art research, unavailable for review in this article, have been published by South Asian authors over the past five years, notably those by Biswas and Malla (2013; 2014a, b), and regional overviews including Verma's (2012) review of Rock Art of the Central Region, and Dubey-Pathak's (2013) Rock Art of Pachmarhi Biosphere. Purakala, the journal of the Rock Art Society of India (RASI), is not currently available on the internet, and as a result many discoveries published in this venue are inaccessible outside of the subcontinent. A recent special issue of Man in India (2011) focuses upon rock art research, but again, it is unavailable on the internet making it largely inaccessible outside of India. This paper will review recent, accessible publications focused upon rock art research in India, split between synthetic approaches, and regional discoveries and reviews, presented in a state by state fashion, working broadly from north to south.