The Prehistoric Rock Shelter Paintings Of Lakhudiyar, Kumaon Uttarakhand, India-A Study

South Asian Studies, 2025

In this paper, we discuss continuities in rock art preserving long-term visual histories in the Eastern Vindhyan Hills of Mirzapur and Sonbhadra Districts of southern Uttar Pradesh. Following this argument, we also try to explicate the probable causes of symbolic historical narratives, from the Mesolithic until the nineteenth century, in the Vindhyan highlands. It is thought that "prehistoric" groups had memory but no sense of history, but the past was depicted, curated, and storied panels continued from prehistory to the present, on the mountainous peripheries of the Ganges Valley. Symbolic skills for depiction, in various media, were also passed down through several generations of escarpment dwelling. We treat rock drawings and paintings therefore as a social self-reflexive record of "the past within the past", by connecting visual representation with cognition and memory. In the documentation presented, we refer to the local ethnography of traditional pastoral and agricultural groups with notable symbolic behaviour. Among these plateau groups, symbolic depiction was a cultural response to environmental change and, much later, early historic urbanization in adjoining valleys. Notable urban demands upon indigenous raw material resources and labour led to representations in which nonindigenous people were also drawn and painted. We conclude that rock paintings were adjunct to oral tradition and were a form of inclusive "cultural cognition".

From Megaliths to Maritime Landscapes: Perspectives on Indo-Pacific Archaeology. SEAMEO SPAFA. Bangkok. Pp. 157-177, 2024

While the study of rock art has been conventionally the concern of prehistory, much of its content in the Northern Vindhyas, India, is in the historical period and requires a historical interrogation. While the early Holocene rock art here is contextually associated with non or semi-geometric microliths and can be regarded as Upper Palaeolithic, the more emphatic, extensive, and skilled rock art exposition is during the Mesolithic. Mesolithic North Vindhyan rock art also has more geometric microliths, large numbers of shelter-dwellings, prepared stone-floors, human and faunal remains, corded incised handmade Mesolithic pottery, grinding stones and occasional and Iron Age tools. On the scarps, paintings of large antelopes, cattle, buffalo, elephants, rhinos, turtles, varanus, and smaller deer species dominate the Mesolithic, while neolithic-chalcolithic and Iron Age depictions contain more human figures, domesticated cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, and greater dress, hairstyle, self-images, palm-prints, iron-tools, three-dimensional perspectives, landscape simulations, superimpositions and narrative structure. Paintings show cognitively advanced choices in surface selection, the use of templates like three-dimensionality, perspective, and movement, in the selection and narrative rendering of historically oriented themes. Inter-group, identity-based differences between the several groups inhabiting the uplands and their conflicts are also represented. Historically structured materials like pastoral corrals, stelae, memorial stones, historical sculpture, and Brahmi inscriptions contextual to rock art, are found in the valleys and the foothills. Early historic trans-Indian trade routes occur in the Vindhyas and these routes are dotted with early historic inscriptions in the Brahmi script and its variants like Mauryan, Siddhamatrika, Shankha, proto-Nagari and Nagari. Their symbolic unity and continuity with upland symbolic traditions are many. Distinctly medieval rock art includes themes like soldiers, flag marches, hunting, and elephant capture by feudal lords. The final period of north Vindhyan rock art is colonial when paintings made by indigenes of the area depict the looting of colonial horse-carts and buggies after which rock art declines and disappears.

Archaeopress Publishers, 2024

The second volume in a proposed trilogy on Vindhyan History based on our field investigations and documentation of rock art and associated archaeological remains in Mirzapur and Sonbhadra, Southern Uttar Pradesh.

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.

Kalyana Mitra: Festschrift to Prof. P. Chenna Reddy, 2023

This paper considers the dominant styles, themes and techniques in the Northern Vindhyas rock art in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The term style is taken to include a common minimum pattern in the use of colours, basic shapes, techniques of drawing and painting images, typical themes and narratives, as well as authors of this art which includes very young children, young adults and elders. It is argued that rock art was here made through the long-term, from the end of the Pleistocene through to early history, medieval and modern periods, and therefore it shows that great social and memory values attached themselves to such activity.

This paper is about a painted rock shelter from Banpur in North Karnapura rift valley, Jharkhand, explored in 2013 by the present author. The rock shelter of Banpur belongs to the clusters of rock art sites, within Satpahar mountain range in Chatra district. This paper presents the theme, style, and state of preservation of the rock art at the site. It is in the vicinity of other famous rock art sites like Satpahar, Thetangi, Saraiya and Kandhar, Sidpa, Gonda, Raham, etc. The rock shelter of Banpur has two panels with zoomorphic, Anthropomorphic and Geometric figures depicted in red ochre, yellow ochre white and black pigments. The superimposition can be easily identified and can be helpful in interpreting the chronology.

Present paper based on the general aspects of the Kaimurian rock art, its distribution and description. These details are especially helpful to understand the extent to which it has decided the archaeological and historical frameworks of the region. In the present work, it has been attempted to make a systematic study of rock art of the Bhagwanpur block of Kaimur district based on the field exploration, scientific documentation, analysis of artifacts related to rock art found in course of exploration of the region. And the present attempt to make an archaeological study of the Kaimurian (those tribes and live person who evolve and developed in this region only also they did artistic work in the caves and shelter, which is still live). The present study includes only the Bhagwanpur block, site selection, about the earlier excavations in this region, general features and subject matter of paintings, style notation, orientations, chronology, comparative analyses, the Superimposition of the paintings and the Kaimurian ancestor made and an attempt has been done.

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Journal of the Directorate of Culture and Archaeology, 2014

Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology 8.2, 2020

The rock shelter at Isko is a well-known rock art site in the Hazaribagh district of Jharkhand. The present research is carried out to understand the prehistoric and present cultural context of Barkagaon block of Jharkhand by drawing a general comparative analogy between rock art at Isko and ethnic traditions. Interpretation of symbols of rock art has been attempted with the help of an ethnographic study on paintings, symbolic beliefs, tattoos and religious customs of Munda, Birhor and Oraon communities in the study area. The recent find of microliths near the Isko rock shelter can be useful aid for understanding the chronology and identify the authors of the rock art.