Author:
Publication: BBC News
Date: March 19, 2004
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3520384.stm
Archaeologists have rediscovered
a huge rock art site in southern India where ancient people used boulders
to make musical sounds in rituals.
The Kupgal Hill site includes rocks
with unusual depressions that were designed to be struck with the purpose
of making loud, musical ringing tones.
It was lost after its discovery
in 1892, so this is the first fresh effort to describe the site in over
a century.
Details of the research are outlined
in the archaeological journal Antiquity.
A dyke on Kupgal Hill contains hundreds
and perhaps thousands of rock art engravings, or petroglyphs, a large quantity
of which date to the Neolithic, or late Stone Age (several thousand years
BC).
Researchers think shamans or young
males came to the site to carry out rituals and to "tap into" the power
of the site. However, some of it is now at threat from quarrying activities.
Granite percussion
The boulders which have small, groove-like
impressions are called "musical stones" by locals. When struck with small
granite rocks, these impressions emit deep, "gong-like notes".
These boulders may have been an
important part of formalised rituals by the people who came there.
In some cultures, percussion plays
a role in rituals that are intended for shamen to communicate with the
supernatural world. The Antiquity work's author, Dr Nicole Boivin, of the
University of Cambridge, UK, thinks this could be the purpose of the Kupgal
stones.
The first report of the site was
in 1892, in the Asiatic Quarterly Review. But subsequent explorers who
tried to find it were unable to do so.
Dr Boivin has been documenting the
site. A few pictures of the site were taken in the 19th Century, but the
originals were either lost, or allowed to fade.
Destruction imminent
Many of the motifs on the rocks
are of cattle, in particular the long-horned humped-back type found in
southern India (Bos indicus).
However, some are of human-like
figures, either on their own or with cattle. Some of these in chains, or
holding bows and arrows.
The typically masculine nature of
the engravings leads Dr Boivin to suggest that the people who made the
images were men and possibly those involved in herding cattle or stealing
them.
The motifs themselves were made
by bruising the rocks, presumably with a stone implement.
She believes that the people who
made the motifs and those who went to view them must have been physically
fit and agile.
Some of the images are in locations
so difficult to reach that the artist must have suspended themselves -
or got others to suspend them - from an overhang to make the images.
Modern-day commercial granite quarrying
has already disturbed some sections of the hill. A rock shelter with even
older rock art to the north of Kupgal Hill has been partially destroyed
by quarrying.
"It is clear government intervention
will be required to elicit effective protection for the majority of the
sites in the [area] if these are not to be erased completely over the course
of future years," writes Dr Boivin in Antiquity.
