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India's Village of the Dead
Volume 63 Number 3, May/June 2010
Text and photographs by Samir S. Patel
<--- http://www.archaeology.org/1005/etc/india.html
An exclusive look at a little-known Iron Age cemetery
There's no clear path to Hire Benakal in the hills north of the Tungabhadra River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. If you have to double back only two or three times on the way, you've done well. University of Chicago anthropology graduate student Andrew Bauer leads me through the thorns and boulders until we emerge on a high plain surrounded by ridges. He points out knee-high aligned stones and propped-up slabs that mark the edges of the site. As we navigate through it, we walk around a pile of house-sized boulders, and the massive scale of Hire Benakal, like a city skyline in the distance, becomes apparent.
On a gentle slope are scores of dolmens (megalithic tombs) resembling houses of cards—if playing cards were slabs of granite 10 feet tall and weighed 10 tons or more. The monuments were built over more than 1,000 years spanning the southern Indian Iron Age (1200-500 B.C.) and Early Historic (500 B.C.-A.D. 500) periods, and there are more than 1,000 of them across nearly 50 acres, from modest rock enclosures to mausoleum-like tombs.
Volume 63 Number 3, May/June 2010
Text and photographs by Samir S. Patel
<--- http://www.archaeology.org/1005/etc/india.html
An exclusive look at a little-known Iron Age cemetery
There's no clear path to Hire Benakal in the hills north of the Tungabhadra River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. If you have to double back only two or three times on the way, you've done well. University of Chicago anthropology graduate student Andrew Bauer leads me through the thorns and boulders until we emerge on a high plain surrounded by ridges. He points out knee-high aligned stones and propped-up slabs that mark the edges of the site. As we navigate through it, we walk around a pile of house-sized boulders, and the massive scale of Hire Benakal, like a city skyline in the distance, becomes apparent.
On a gentle slope are scores of dolmens (megalithic tombs) resembling houses of cards—if playing cards were slabs of granite 10 feet tall and weighed 10 tons or more. The monuments were built over more than 1,000 years spanning the southern Indian Iron Age (1200-500 B.C.) and Early Historic (500 B.C.-A.D. 500) periods, and there are more than 1,000 of them across nearly 50 acres, from modest rock enclosures to mausoleum-like tombs.