1 { THE MEGALITHIC BURIAL COMPLEX AT HIRE BENKAL A site of grave importance

This massive 2,500-year-old site now an hour’s drive from Hampi isn’t nearly as well-known as the temple complex. From a distance, the Hire Benkal site looks like a deserted village of stone houses. It’s actually a burial complex. The “houses” are megalithic funerary monuments, stone structures built to commemorate the dead in this part of Karnataka.

Each of the 1,000 structures was meant to help the person interred enjoy a comfortable afterlife.

“These monuments make you curious about the way our ancestors perceived death,” says Bengaluru-based heritage researcher Meera Iyer, state convenor for INTACH. “It also helps us understand where our ritualistic practices might have come from.”

Partial excavations near the site have revealed bones, ash and grave goods such as pottery and grain, as well as iron implements such as fishhooks and arrows.

Though this isn’t the only megalithic burial site in South India, it is one of the largest and most architecturally diverse.

In this sea of dolmens with portholes (large vertical stones with circular holes cut into them and a horizontal stone placed at the top), some funerary monuments are large and some are small.

Scattered across the area are dozens of smaller monuments too, including cists (coffin-like boxes made of stone); cairns (piles of rocks under which cists might lie); stone circles; and menhirs (large, upright stones).

The Hire Benkal site also contains 11 prehistoric rock shelters, with paintings that date back to 700 BCE to 500 BCE. The paintings depict animals, birds, insects and human figures (some are holding hands, others riding horses or hunting).