Credit: Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed. Frontline.
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A ruined megalithic tomb in Hirebenekal.
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50 kilometres from the monuments
of Hampi, is a large and diverse Megalithic site. Called Hirebenakal after a
village at the foot of the hill on top of which it sits in splendid solitude,
it is close to the left bank of the Tungabhadra river. Hirebenakal is an important site for archaeologists and anthropologists
trying to uncover the mysteries of the lives of our ancestors as they made the
transition from the Neolithic Age (New Stone Age) to the Iron Age. Megaliths,
structures built with large stones, are present all over the world.
Stonehenge in the United Kingdom is perhaps the most famous Megalithic site of the wrold. Megaliths have existed
from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period and through the Neolithic period.
Indian megaliths, on the other hand, “...generally belong to the Iron Age and
are largely sepulchral in nature”, according to a paper, “The Archaeology of the
Megaliths in India: 1947-1997”, by R.K. Mohanty (of Deccan College, Pune) and
V. Selvakumar (of Tamil University, Thanjavur). Hirebenakal is also a large burial site.
Philip Meadows Taylor,
the early British expert on Indian megaliths, in 1835 wrote about “Hire Benakal”
in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society when he was in
the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad State. Further work on the megaliths of
the site was done by Captain Leonard Munn, who published his findings in The
Journal Hyderabad Geological Survey in 1934. But it was only in the
post-Independence period that systematic work on megaliths in India was
undertaken, after Sir Mortimer Wheeler, famously associated with the
excavations at the Indus Valley site, gave a definite impetus to the work of
the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as its Director between 1944 and 1948.
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