Bhimbetka

Discovery

The shelters lie in a band of sandstone outcrops covered by forest on the southern edge of the Vindhya hills. The name comes from Bhima, the second Pandava of the Mahabharata, and means "Bhima's sitting place". The archaeologist Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar noticed the formations from a train in 1957 and recognised them as similar to the painted shelters of Spain and France. His surveys, and excavations in the 1970s, revealed hundreds of shelters with paintings and long sequences of occupation.

Occupation

Excavation in some shelters found tools of the Lower Palaeolithic Acheulean tradition, handaxes and cleavers, showing that early humans used the area hundreds of thousands of years ago. Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic layers follow, with microlithic tools, burials and evidence of hunting and gathering, and later levels with pottery and metal. The region has been inhabited by forest peoples into modern times, and the villages around the site preserve traditions of painting that some scholars have connected with the rock art.

Some researchers, notably Robert Bednarik, have argued that cup-shaped marks ground into the rock in one shelter, the so-called Auditorium cave, date from the Lower Palaeolithic and are among the oldest known marks of human symbolic behaviour anywhere. The dating is not secure, and the claim is debated.

The paintings

The paintings are mostly in red and white, with some green and yellow, made from mineral pigments. They are found on walls and ceilings, often superimposed in many layers. Scholars divide them into phases. The earliest, usually assigned to the Mesolithic, show animals, many large and naturalistic, such as bison, deer, boar, elephants and rhinoceros, and human figures hunting, dancing, gathering honey and carrying children. Later phases show people with domestic animals, and in the historic period men on horses and elephants with weapons, processions, and some religious symbols, along with inscriptions in early scripts.

The dating of the paintings is difficult, since direct scientific dates are few. Estimates for the oldest range from about ten thousand years ago or earlier, and the sequence extends to the medieval period.

The site today

Bhimbetka was inscribed by UNESCO in 2003 as part of a protected landscape that includes surrounding forest and villages. A small part of the site is open to visitors along a marked path. In 2021 researchers reported a possible fossil of Dickinsonia, a 550-million-year-old organism, on a shelter ceiling, but the identification was soon withdrawn, the mark proving to be the remains of a beehive.