Volunteer Explorers Led by Sudhir Risbud Found More Than 40 New Prehistoric Carving Sites on the Konkan's Laterite Plateaus, and UNESCO's Tentative List Now Names Nine Sites, From Barsu's 62 Geoglyphs to Kasheli's Elephant

UNESCO’s Tentative List carries an entry numbered 6605, “Geoglyphs of Konkan Region of India”. India’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO submitted it on 17 February 2022 under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv), and it names nine component sites: Kasheli, Rundhe Tali, Devache Gothane, Barsu, Devi Hasol, Jambharun, Kudopi and Ukshi in Maharashtra, and Pansaymol in Goa. The carvings are cut into bare laterite, a porous red-brown rock, on the coastal plateaus that Marathi and Konkani speakers call sada. The nomination says the clusters run about 900 km along the Arabian Sea coast and date from the Mesolithic, about 10,000 years ago, to the early historic period, about 1,700 years ago. A tentative-list entry is a waiting-list step, not a World Heritage inscription.

What the figures look like

The nomination defines a geoglyph as rock art made on the surface of the ground, either by placing stones or by carving away part of a rock surface to leave a design. The Konkan carvings use the second method, in two styles it calls etching (thin lines) and scooping (removing the rock around a figure so the figure stands in low relief). The nomination’s comparison section puts the relief at no more than two to three inches deep, though it describes the Devi Hasol panel as scooped 8 to 10 cm. Many figures are life-size or larger: at Jambharun, where the nomination counts 50 geoglyphs in an area of about 25 by 25 metres, the human figures are a little larger than life and the animals close to life-size.

The nomination says the Mesolithic carvings were made with stone tools and the later ones with metal and stone tools. The archaeologist Rutwij Apte told The Hindu in 2018 that some of the deeper, more complex reliefs may have been cut with metal, and that if this is proved the plateaus would show people living there across many thousands of years, as at Bhimbetka.

The man between two tigers at Barsu

Barsu has the largest cluster on the coastal belt: 62 geoglyphs, according to the nomination. The best known is a figure of a man, about four metres tall, with arms stretched out, standing between two tigers that leap towards him. The panel measures 17.5 by 4.5 metres. The tigers are drawn in rectangles with open mouths, and their stripes are built from horizontal and vertical lines forming rectangles and triangles, while the man has a round head and a curved waist. Beside his torso are a fish, a rabbit and a peacock. The lines are not much deeper than two inches.

The nomination, ThePrint and the survey team’s own 2023 chapter all record that scholars have pointed to a resemblance between this composition and a motif on at least two seals from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, the Indus cities. The chapter credits the comparison to the writer Ravindra Lad, who in 2018 published a book relating Konkan carvings to Indus culture. All three present it as a resemblance noticed by scholars, not as a demonstrated link.

Kasheli’s elephant and the animals in the stone

The nomination calls the Kasheli elephant, 18 by 13 metres, the largest rock engraving in the Indian context. The team’s 2023 chapter, by Tejas Garge, Rutwij Apte and Sudhir Risbud, gives it as 16 by 13 metres and calls it the largest known geoglyph in the South Asian context. Inside and around its outline are 70 to 80 smaller animals by the nomination’s count and almost 80 by the chapter’s: sharks, stingrays, a tiger, a monkey, a boar, a rhinoceros and a peacock among them. The nomination says no other known site in India has reported an engraved composition of this size and complexity. Stone flakes of quartz and quartzite, called microliths, were collected within 20 metres of the elephant. The nomination says they may not be the tools that made the carvings, but that they show people were active there at the end of the Pleistocene, the Ice Age epoch.

The chapter counts 280 animal figures documented in Ratnagiri district: 56 fish, 31 birds, 30 wild boar, 19 deer or antelope, 13 elephants, 11 tigers, 10 monkeys, 8 reptiles and 5 rhinoceroses, with 97 not identified. It says many are life-size or larger, unlike the miniature animals of most Indian rock art, and that the rhinoceros figures resemble the single-horned rhinoceros now found only in north-east India. The largest, at Deud, measures 4 by 3 metres. The nomination lists the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus among the species shown, and The Hindu also reported hippopotamus carvings. The team’s 2023 table has no hippopotamus.

Other sites add their own subjects. Kudopi in Sindhudurg district has around 80 geoglyphs in three clusters, with humped cattle, deer and boar. Pansaymol, in Goa on the bank of the Kushavati river, is the only component with concentric circles and cup marks, and it also shows humped cattle, peacocks and deer. Devache Gothane has one standing human figure on an open laterite flat. The nomination records magnetic deflection around it and says the effect needs scientific research to explain.

A road widening, a school memory and 52 sites

The first carving site on record is near the village of Nivli. The 2023 chapter says that in 1990, while a road was being widened, carved lines were reported to the Ratnagiri division of the state Directorate of Archaeology and Museums. Researchers from Deccan College, Pune, Vishwas Gogate, Shrikant Pradhan and Prabodh Shirvalkar, surveyed villages in 2000 and 2001 and found more sites, and Satish Lalit reported carvings at Kudopi and Hiwale in Sindhudurg district. A Marathi book of 1995 by P. K. Ghanekar gave the carvings their Marathi name, katalshilpa.

Sudhir Risbud, an electrical engineer from Ratnagiri, remembered the carved relief beside the road at Nivli (spelled Nivali or Niwali in some reports) from his school days, and in the mid-2000s he found more near the Aryadurga temple and Ganpatipule. The photographer Kevin Standage writes that Risbud then spent about 25 years exploring the Konkan with colleagues Dhananjay Marathe and Surendra Thakurdesai. In 2010 he formed an informal group, Adgalnavarche Konkan, or Unexplored Konkan. In 2012 the group began asking villagers, who knew the plateaus from before new roads were built. A shepherd at Barsu Sada described a place called Gowal, and the visit that followed turned up a site with 42 figures. The 2023 chapter credits Risbud, Thakurdesai and Marathe, working for the Ratnagiri organisation Nisarga Yatri Sanstha, with more than 40 new sites beside the six already known, their findings first appearing in local Marathi newspapers.

The state came in after the volunteers had made the case. Garge, director of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, visited Ratnagiri in 2016 after Risbud asked to meet him and showed him sketches. In 2017 he posted Apte, an archaeology department official, to work full time on the carvings. The chapter says the Directorate began a survey in September 2017, jointly with Nisarga Yatri Sanstha, with the aim of declaring the sites protected monuments, and that it documented the 52 known sites and found more. The Hindu reported that the state had set aside Rs 24 crore for further research. The Indian Express quoted Risbud in April 2022 on the tentative listing: “a proud moment for the whole team of Nisarga Yatri”.

How old they are, and who says what

No source we read reports a direct scientific date for the carvings themselves. The nomination bases its Mesolithic to early historic range on stylistic analysis. Garge told The Hindu in 2018 that the working theory was about 10,000 BCE, for two reasons: carvings of this kind are linked at other sites with Mesolithic tools, and stone tools were found near the Kasheli carvings. He said a more precise date was hard because the first explorers, being amateurs, had cleared away soil around the carvings that would normally have been part of the record. Apte said more stone tools and traces of settlement near the sites were needed.

The 2023 chapter adds three lines of reasoning. The carvings show no bull, cow or dog, which the authors say points to a time before domestication, and no hunting scenes, unlike painted rock art elsewhere in India. Microliths found near Kasheli, Rundhe Tali and Chave, they write, lead to speculation that some carvings date to the Mesolithic. And the rock-art specialist Erwin Neumayer, quoted by personal communication, wrote that “one group of the laterite pictures are stylistically related to the Mesolithic rock art in the Deccan”. In a June 2026 report carried by Swarajya, Garge repeated the animal argument and added that the absence of horses points to prehistory. The nomination lists humped cattle at Kudopi and Pansaymol, the two southernmost components, and its range runs on to the early historic period.

Earlier writers dated the carvings differently. The chapter records that Dawood Dalvi assigned them to the Neolithic in 1990, and that Gogate and colleagues wrote in 2008 that, without habitation or pottery, no period could be assigned.

Published ages for the carvings run from 6,000 to 20,000 years, apart from one outlier below. The Times of India’s report of the 2024 notification said the culture department placed one group, at Deud, in the Mesolithic, roughly 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, and ThePrint repeats that range. The Indian Express reported in 2022 that a claim of up to 20,000 years has been made, to be tested by carbon and geological dating. Frontline in 2023 quoted Apte as suggesting 6,000 to 10,000 years. The nomination states a legacy of 12,000 years in one place and the Mesolithic from 10,000 years ago in another, and its justification section says “since 30,000 years ago”, the outlier. Garge also told The Hindu that the carvings are not yet evidence of a civilisation: there is no writing, farming or settlement, and the makers were more likely hunter-gatherers moving through the area.

How many there are

The count has risen with each survey, and the sources count different things:

• 52 sites with over 1,000 petroglyphs, January 2019 (Standage; The Hindu). The Directorate’s joint survey gave 550 or more in Ratnagiri tehsil, 350 or more in Rajapur and 90 or more in Lanja, along about 170 km of coast (2023 chapter).
• More than 1,500 at 70 sites in Ratnagiri district (The Indian Express, April 2022; ThePrint, August 2024).
• Over 1,700 in more than 72 villages, found by Nisarga Yatri Sanstha (The Indian Express, December 2022).
• More than 2,000 at 140 sites in 90 villages, a figure from activists (Frontline, June 2023).
• About 3,000, a figure Risbud gave in June 2026, in a project area the report puts at 107 villages (Swarajya).
• More than 600 figures in the nine component sites named for UNESCO (the nomination).

Carvings that communities already treat as theirs

The Hindu reported that local tribal communities treated the Nivali relief with reverence as a legacy of their forefathers. The nomination says the Devi Hasol panel, an 8.5 by 8.5 metre abstract design of nested rectangles near the Aryadurga temple, is an integral part of rituals carried out at the temple. Impart’s encyclopedia entry adds that human figures are often called gaonrakha, village guardian, by the people who live near them. At Devache Gothane, Risbud, Apte and Marathe helped put a ring of stones around the standing figure, and at Ukshi they worked with local authorities to build a circular viewing gallery around the elephant, with an inscription explaining it.

Protection and what comes next

The nomination says local communities protect the sites and that their efforts have supported the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums in giving them legal protection. In August 2024 the Maharashtra government notified rock art in Ratnagiri as protected monuments under the Maharashtra Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1960. The Times of India’s account of the notification describes specific groups, including the Deud group with a rhinoceros, deer, monkey, donkey and footprints, and a protected area of 210 square metres. ThePrint described the notification as covering about 1,500 geoglyphs at 70 locations. The two accounts differ, and we have not seen the notification text. For how the list stood in October 2026, see our note on the latest additions to India’s tentative list. Maharashtra’s state profile and the Goa profile cover the two states the entry spans.

The Barsu plateau is also the proposed site of an oil refinery. In December 2022 a committee of experts led by the archaeologist Vasant Shinde told the Indian Express that more than 250 geoglyphs had been identified in the area for the refinery, and that the project could be set up elsewhere in the Konkan beyond 5 to 6 km of the carvings. In April 2023 Maharashtra’s chief minister said the project would not go ahead without the consent of local people, according to PTI. The sources we read do not report a final decision on the site.

In June 2026 Swarajya reported a four-year project, with IITM Pravartak, the technology hub of IIT Madras, appointed to document the carvings digitally using drones and AI. Garge said the Archaeological Survey of India’s nomination slots are taken until 2028 to 2029 and that Maharashtra is aiming to submit the nomination in 2030.