The Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, Inscribed by UNESCO in 2003 and Described by ICOMOS as One of the Densest Known Concentrations of Rock Art, Hold Paintings Dated by Style and Excavation From the Mesolithic Onward

UNESCO put the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka on the World Heritage List in 2003. The protected area covers 1,893 hectares of sandstone hills in Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh, and India’s nomination file counts 243 shelters on Bhimbetka hill alone, 133 of them with paintings. The file places the nearest village, Bhiyanpura, 45 km southeast of Bhopal.

UNESCO’s own description is short. The shelters lie in the foothills of the Vindhyan Mountains on the southern edge of the central Indian plateau, in massive sandstone outcrops above comparatively dense forest. There are five clusters of natural shelters, with paintings that UNESCO says appear to date from the Mesolithic Period right through to the historical period. Twenty-one villages next to the site keep traditions that closely resemble those on the walls. Our Madhya Pradesh profile lists it with the state’s other two World Heritage sites, Khajuraho and Sanchi.

What UNESCO inscribed in 2003

The World Heritage Committee inscribed Bhimbetka at its 27th session on cultural criteria (iii) and (v). Under criterion (iii), the Committee’s wording is that Bhimbetka reflects a long interaction between people and the land around them, shown in “the quantity and quality of its rock art”. Under criterion (v), it says the site is closely associated with a hunting and gathering economy, shown in the paintings and in surviving traces of that tradition in the adivasi (indigenous) villages on the edge of the property.

The UNESCO list page gives the property as 1,893 hectares with a buffer zone of 10,280 hectares. The nomination file gives the core as 1,892 hectares, and the ICOMOS evaluation, the advisory body’s report, uses both 1,893 and 1,892. ICOMOS’s evaluation describes the shelters as forming one of the densest known concentrations of rock art.

Why the shelter counts differ

The sources count different things, so their numbers are not interchangeable. UNESCO speaks of five clusters. ICOMOS’s report lists 400 painted shelters in those five clusters, with one more large complex in the buffer zone, and notes that the nomination itself documented 133 painted shelters. The nomination file says Wakankar’s survey found over 700 shelters in the region. Of the 243 in the Bhimbetka group, 133 contain paintings, and the neighbouring Lakha Juar group has 178 shelters over two hills.

The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page gives yet another description: seven hills and over 750 shelters spread over 10 km. The Bhopal researcher Meenakshi Dubey-Pathak names the five hills of the core as Vinayka, Bhonrawali, Bhimbetka, Lakhajuar east and Lakhajuar west. Only Bhimbetka hill is easily accessible, she writes, and fewer than twenty painted shelters are open each day.

The nomination file says the name Bhimbetka is traditionally derived from Bhimbaithaka, the seat of Bhima, one of the five Pandavas of the Mahabharata.

Wakankar’s 1957 identification and the digs after it

India’s nomination file and the ICOMOS report both say the site complex was discovered by V. S. Wakankar in 1957. Dubey-Pathak writes that Wakankar used to say he noticed the sandstone formations from a train, got down to explore, and found Bhimbetka. She says he studied the shelters until his death in 1988.

The nomination counts 1971 as the first systematic investigation, when K. D. Bajpai and S. K. Pandey of Sagar University studied two shelters. From 1972 Wakankar surveyed the region from Kari Talai to Jaora, dividing it into seven topographical areas, lettering the clusters and numbering each shelter, a system the file says is still followed. Between 1972 and 1977, Wakankar, V. N. Misra of Deccan College and Susan Haas of the Basel museum excavated at Bhimbetka and found a continuous sequence of Stone Age cultures from the Late Acheulian to the Late Mesolithic, along with some of the world’s oldest stone floors and walls, in the nomination’s words. K. D. Banerjee of the Archaeological Survey’s prehistory branch dug there in 1981 and 1982. The Survey took charge of the site in 1990, and the Gazette notification followed in February 1990 under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958.

What the paintings show

ICOMOS describes the paintings as largely white and red, a record of the animal life of the surrounding forest and of economic and social life. They include extinct fauna, domesticated animals, carts and chariots, patterns, inscriptions and Buddhist symbols of the historical period, and processions of men on caparisoned horses and elephants, and battle scenes. Sizes run from five centimetres to a faded ceiling animal in shelter III C-6, nearly five metres long and two metres across. Up to fifteen layers of paint lie over one another in some shelters.

Dubey-Pathak summarises the counts made by Y. Mathpal in 1984. They include 2,330 human figures and 1,377 animal images of about 29 species, among them 15 tigers, 88 wild buffaloes and 113 chital (spotted deer). Of 561 horses, all belong to historic times, and 510 of them carry riders. She also lists 161 dancers, 285 hunter figures and 222 hands, mostly handprints. Shelter III C-50 is popularly known as Zoo Rock for its animals. In shelter III C-19 a mythical animal that she says combines features of boar, ox and elephant, 1.26 metres long, appears to chase a small masked man and a large crab.

The nomination dates the painted and engraved inscriptions from the second century BC, in Sunga-period Brahmi script, to the seventh century AD.

How the paintings are dated

The nomination says plainly that no absolute dates exist for the paintings. India’s file lists the bases of the chronology: colour finds in excavations, mostly mineral nodules and rubbed cakes of haematite red from the earliest Mesolithic layers, plus patina, cultural content, plants and animals, superimposition and style.

From the paintings themselves the file reasons that many were made when microliths, small stone blades, had become small enough to serve as arrow barbs and when there were no domesticated animals, which points to the Mesolithic. Geometric patterns that resemble Malwa pottery designs point to the Chalcolithic, the copper-using period. ICOMOS wrote that the rock art had not been directly dated with accelerator mass spectrometry, and that direct dating with Australian researchers was under way. On present knowledge, it said, the art dates from the Mesolithic, around 10,000 years ago, into the historic and recent periods. We found no published direct date for a Bhimbetka painting in the sources we opened.

Wakankar’s own scheme, as Dubey-Pathak reports it from his 1976 book with R. R. R. Brooks, has five periods. Period 1 is Mesolithic or earlier, 8000 (marked uncertain) to 2500 BC. Period 2 runs from 2500 to 300 BC, Period 3 from 300 BC to AD 800, and Periods 4 and 5 from AD 800 to the present. He placed green figures in the Upper Palaeolithic, outside that scheme.

The Ministry of Tourism’s page gives a different range. It says the paintings go back to the Mesolithic, Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods and calls some of them up to 30,000 years old. UNESCO’s wording, “appear to date from the Mesolithic Period”, is narrower, and the nomination file’s own caution is stronger.

Wakankar’s Period 2 begins in the centuries when the Harappan towns of Lothal and Dholavira were occupied. The sources we read do not link the shelters to those towns. The nomination file says the stratified deposits with Chalcolithic pottery show contact between Chalcolithic people of the plains and the shelters.

The Auditorium Cave markings

Auditorium Cave is the largest cave at Bhimbetka. The Ministry of Tourism describes Gothic arches and a “cathedral-like” feel. The archaeologist Robert Bednarik puts the rock tower that holds it at the highest point of the range, 619 metres above sea level. A boulder near the cave’s centre is known as Chief’s Rock, a name Indian archaeologists gave it and one for which Bednarik finds no evidence of ritual use.

Bednarik reports that in 1990 eleven petroglyphs, marks cut into rock, were observed in the cave. Wakankar had earlier taken them for rock gong markings. Two of them, a cupule (a round cup-shaped hollow) and a meandering groove, had been excavated by Wakankar from an Acheulian deposit that directly covered them. Bednarik writes that Wakankar had not noticed them. The other nine, all cupules, are on the east face of Chief’s Rock. Bednarik proposed in 1996 that they are of similar age, and an attempt to date one by microerosion analysis put it beyond the range of the method, on which basis an age above 100,000 years has been proposed.

Bednarik later revised that proposal. In his 2008 paper on cupules he writes that the Auditorium Cave cupules may belong instead to a chopping-tool tradition found below the two Acheulian horizons. In the Cave Art Research newsletter the same year he says the evidence at Bhimbetka is “much weaker” than at Daraki-Chattan, a cupule cave in the Chambal basin of central India. Kumar, Krishna and Bednarik wrote in 2019 that Auditorium Cave holds the only other rock-art corpus of apparently similar antiquity to Daraki-Chattan’s. The French specialist Michel Lorblanchet judged markings he saw in 1993 to be natural, and Bednarik replies that he examined other depressions.

ICOMOS says trench III F in Auditorium Cave was preserved for public viewing. Bednarik writes that the Survey covered the two buried petroglyphs again in 1991 when it enlarged the trench and built a masonry wall with a steel railing, and that the nine cupules on Chief’s Rock stay exposed to visitors.

What the Committee asked of India

ICOMOS had recommended deferring the nomination so that India could clarify community involvement, boundaries and the extent of the painted corpus. The Committee inscribed the site instead. Its decision asks India to survey the rock art in the nominated area, and appraise its conservation, within one year if possible. It also suggests extending the boundary in future to take in part of the wider area around the adivasi villages. India’s file reported that no complete inventory of the paintings existed, and listed fading in sunlight, water run-off, algae and vandalism as causes of damage.

Visiting Bhimbetka

The Ministry of Tourism puts the shelters 45 km from Bhopal near the village of Bhiyapura, along the Bhopal to Hoshangabad highway. Its listed hours are 7:00 to 18:00. The nomination file notes that the site lies inside the northern edge of the Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary.

Dubey-Pathak writes that the open shelters are accessible from morning to evening all year, with paved paths, railings in front of the painted walls, information panels, guards and free brochures. Photography is allowed. None of the official pages we could open lists a ticket price, so confirm it with the Archaeological Survey’s Bhopal Circle or at the gate. Dubey-Pathak gives an average of more than 40,000 visitors a year, and the nomination file estimated about 2,000 a month in the November to March peak.