Bhimbetka rock shelters
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How it came to be
In the foothills of the Vindhya range in central India, natural rock shelters cluster in five groups among massive sandstone outcrops. The name means Bhima's resting place, after the second of the five Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata. According to the Archaeological Survey of India, people lived here from Acheulean times to the 2nd century BC.
In 1888 W. Kincaid, an official in British India, mentioned Bhimbetka in a scholarly paper and called it a Buddhist site. In 1957 the archaeologist V. S. Wakankar visited with a team and reported several prehistoric rock shelters, and the true scale of the site was recognised in the 1970s.
More than 750 rock shelters are spread across seven hills, and about 400 hold prehistoric paintings, made from the Mesolithic into historical times. The 21 villages around the site keep traditions that resemble the paintings. It was inscribed as a cultural landscape in 2003.
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