Hire Benkal in Koppal Has Port-Holed Dolmens Across About 20 Hectares of a Granite Hill, and India Put the Iron Age Burial Ground on UNESCO's Tentative List in 2021

The megalithic burial ground at Hire Benkal, in Gangavati taluk of Koppal district, Karnataka, covers about 20 hectares of a granite hill, in three clusters of stone chambers strung out over about one kilometre. India’s entry for it on UNESCO’s Tentative List, submitted on 13 April 2021, counts almost 1,000 structures there from recent studies, and says its large port-holed dolmens dominate the hill, with similar tombs elsewhere in the region known as the Hire Benkal type. The place is also written Hirebenkal and Hire Benakal.

A dolmen is a chamber of upright stones under a flat capstone. A cist is a box of stone slabs, usually sunk in the ground, and a port-hole is the round or half-round opening cut into one of its slabs. The UNESCO file lists cairn circles, menhirs (single standing stones) and passage chambers on the hill as well, and one anthropomorphic figure carved from granite.

Three clusters on one hill

The dossier places the site on a castellated granite hillock, 605 metres high, approached from 3 km south-east of Hire Benkal village. The western, central and eastern groups lie roughly 200 metres apart. The western group sits close to a granite quarry that, according to the dossier, dates to the megalith-building period and also served as a waterhole. The whole 20 hectares lies inside a reserve forest of about 6,748 hectares.

The first published notice of the area’s rock art came in 1934 to 1935, when Leonard Munn reported three paintings near dolmen groups that a Scottish missionary named Keis had recorded earlier, according to the dossier. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) listed Hirebenkal, in Gangavati taluk of what its annual review calls Raichur district, among the sites of megalithic habitation found in 1965 to 1966.

How the tombs were built

Locals call the structures on Morera Hill the Morera Houses. The Koppal district administration’s tourism page describes the usual design: six large slabs, with one for each side and a capstone that extends beyond the walls, and a circular or semi-circular opening cut into one wall. Some cists have a doorway-like frame of two small upright slabs and a horizontal one in front. The page says the body was first buried, the bones were later gathered into a pot and placed in the finished chamber, and pots of food and drink, iron knives, bangles and beads were set beside them. In front of one burial stands a human-shaped stone figure, now leaning.

Both the district page and the UNESCO dossier read the tombs as evidence of a belief in life after death. The district page says the people of the period are believed to have had faith in rebirth. The dossier says the unifying idea behind south India’s megaliths was “death and afterlife”, seen through grave goods, pottery and offerings.

Built beside a quarried rain pool

Andrew M. Bauer of Stanford University has studied the hills of the Tungabhadra corridor, and his account of Hire Benakal is the most detailed in print. In a paper in the Antiquity Project Gallery he writes that Iron Age inhabitants, 1200 BC to 500 BC, modified and created rock pools (water-holding hollows in bare granite) while making ritual places. At Hire Benakal, he says, hundreds of dolmens stand near a broad rock pool that was expanded by quarrying, probably to supply stone for the monuments. At many sites in the region, he adds, thin granite blocks of the same size and shape were used both to bank up the pools and to prop the dolmen capstones.

From this Bauer argues that building the water basins and building the monuments were linked activities, and that early water management in the region had a ritual side. That is his interpretation of the evidence, offered in the article as a suggestion. The UNESCO dossier repeats the pool-and-quarry description for Hire Benkal and adds that the monuments, the rock shelters and the pool suggest the area was probably visited regularly for short periods.

A ringing stone and the painted shelters

The dossier describes a hemispherical boulder on the hill, 2.20 metres across and 1.5 metres high, resting on a 10-metre-high monolithic rock. Struck with a stone or wooden hammer, it gives a musical sound that the dossier says carries beyond a radius of 1 km, and a researcher quoted there suggests it may have been used to warn of invaders or to call people together. That use is a suggestion, not a finding.

The dossier counts 11 rock shelters with paintings so far, showing rows of human figures, a horse rider holding a battle-axe, deer, long-horned bulls and peacocks, and puts the majority of the paintings in the overlap of the Late Neolithic and the early Iron Age, about 700 to 500 BCE. The Koppal district page counts more than 30 caves and shelters with paintings of horsemen, oxen, deer, hunting scenes, group dances, pythons, wild boars, birds and fish, and names the Rakkasagavi cave, where it reports large paintings of a python, childbirth scenes and male figures. For painted shelters that are already World Heritage, see our article on Bhimbetka. The two counts differ, and neither page says how a shelter was counted.

How old, and how many

The sources give the tombs no single agreed age:

• The UNESCO dossier calls the site Iron Age-Megalithic and says the dolmens have stood for more than 2,500 years.
• The Koppal district page puts the burials at about 1200 BCE to 200 BCE.
• Deccan Herald, in April 2025, wrote that the site could be a burial or commemorative place of Iron Age cultures about 3,000 years ago. In April 2026 it wrote that the site’s period is estimated at between the Neolithic and the Iron Age.

Neither the dossier nor the district page names a radiocarbon date for the tombs. The wider debate is older than the site. Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation at Brahmagiri in the 1940s, where black-and-red pottery lay beside iron objects, led him to assign the peninsula’s megaliths to the Iron Age, as the archaeologist Ravi Korisettar told Deccan Herald. An IGNOU study unit lists the later proposals: Wheeler at about the 2nd century BC, Gordon and Haimendorf at about 700 to 400 BC, Seshadri at the 6th century BC to the 1st century AD, and A. Sundara at about 1100 BC for Terdal in Karnataka.

Dating work at other sites has moved the edges. Bauer and Peter G. Johansen published the first radiocarbon dates from megalithic burials near Maski, in Raichur district. Four charcoal samples showed that burial practices usually attributed to the Iron Age are older than that period, so the practices are not precise markers of date, although the burials became more labour-intensive during the Iron Age. At Siruthavoor in Tamil Nadu, a luminescence pilot study by Haricharan, Achyuthan and Suresh gave pottery dates from 300 BC to AD 600.

The counts also differ. The dossier says almost 1,000 structures. The architect and author Sri Kumar Menon told Deccan Herald in 2025 that the site has around 1,000 megaliths of various types, with the dolmens the most eye-catching, while Korisettar put the dolmens alone at a couple of hundred. Deccan Herald’s April 2026 report gives over 400 megaliths. Those are different ways of counting, and the published sources do not reconcile them. The Iron Age iron-working that these burial cultures sat beside is documented at a different site in our article on Kodumanal.

Protection and the tentative list

According to the dossier, Hire Benkal is a centrally protected monument under the ASI’s Hampi Circle, under the Ancient Monuments and Sites and Remains Act, 1958. The dossier says it is little disturbed because it lies away from villages, and it lists what could be added: resetting disturbed structures, signs at viewpoints, pathways to all the main locations and a museum on the megalith builders.

Korisettar told Deccan Herald in April 2025 that, although the site is ASI-notified, it lacks physical protection, and that the ASI has so far fenced small areas of dolmens only at Rajankollur in Yadgir district and at Brahmagiri in Chitradurga. Menon named Hire Benakal among the sites where he saw vandalised megaliths and said treasure-hunting was the biggest cause of damage.

On 25 August 2025 Deccan Herald reported that the state tourism minister, H K Patil, said of the nomination: “We will prepare a proper presentation and put maximum efforts to achieve this.” On 11 April 2026 it reported that the state’s Department of Archaeology, Heritage and Museums was preparing proposals to send to UNESCO for Hirebenakal, Shravanabelagola and Lakkundi. The Commissioner for Archaeology, Heritage and Museums, Devaraj A, said the steps would be verification of the list, a visit by experts from ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) and then approval, and that the tag would help protect the monuments better. He added that UNESCO gives no financial support to listed sites. As of 5 November 2026 UNESCO’s page still shows Hire Benkal as Tentative List entry 6529, and UNESCO’s page notes that the content of a tentative list is the sole responsibility of the State Party concerned.

Getting there

Menon places the site north of Hampi, which is already a World Heritage site. The Koppal district page, checked on 5 November 2026 (its own stamp says last updated 2 April 2026), gives road distances to Hirebenkal of 13.1 km from Gangavati, 39.6 km from Koppal and 43.1 km from Hosapete, with NH50 and SH23 meeting near the village. It names Gangavati, Koppal, Munirabad and Hospet as the nearest railway stations and Jindal Vijaynagar Airport, 58.6 km away, as the nearest airport. The page gives no opening hours or entry rules, and the ASI’s Hampi Circle is the body that can confirm them.