Why Are India's Konkan Petroglyphs Receiving Global Attention?

POV Travel
Jul 26
9 min read

Somebody carved a rhinoceros on the coast of India.

There are no rhinoceroses on the coast of India. There have not been within any human memory, in any record, in any account. And yet there it is, cut into the flat rust red rock above the Arabian Sea, alongside a hippopotamus, in a place where neither animal has any business existing.

Somebody carved them. Which means somebody saw them.

Everything else in this article follows from that single fact, and we would ask you to keep returning to it, because it is the kind of evidence that ought to unsettle the confident story of what this coastline has always been.

Why are India's Konkan petroglyphs receiving global attention?

Quick Answer

The Konkan petroglyphs, also called geoglyphs, are a vast collection of prehistoric carvings on the laterite plateaus of coastal Maharashtra and Goa in western India.

They are drawing attention because of their scale, over a thousand carvings across dozens of sites along hundreds of kilometres of coast, and because of what they depict: animals including rhinoceros and hippopotamus that no longer exist in the region.

Most were identified only in the last fifteen years, largely by local researchers. They were added to India's tentative UNESCO list in 2022. And they are under genuine threat from a proposed industrial development, which is a large part of why the world is now looking.

Carvings on the ground

These are geoglyphs as much as petroglyphs, and the distinction explains why nobody noticed them.

Along this coast the land rises into flat plateaus of laterite, a hard iron rich rock the colour of old brick. Locally the tablelands are called sada. They are open, exposed, and for much of the year they look like nothing at all. On these surfaces, ancient people removed the rock, by scooping, picking, abrading and incising, to create images on the ground rather than on a wall.

The results are large. The great elephant at Kasheli runs roughly fifteen metres across, and inside its outline are hundreds of other creatures: sharks, stingrays, a tiger, deer, boar, monkeys, birds. An entire world nested inside a single animal.

Because they lie flat, often half buried under soil and vegetation, and because their scale exceeds what a standing person can take in, they are extraordinarily easy to walk directly across without seeing.

Which is precisely what happened, for a very long time.

Found by the people who live there

This part deserves telling properly, because it inverts the usual story of archaeological discovery.

Systematic documentation began in earnest around 2012, driven substantially by local researchers and conservationists from the Konkan region itself, walking the plateaus, talking to villagers, recording what they found. Not a foreign expedition. Not a university department flying in. People from Ratnagiri, looking at their own ground.

The numbers that emerged are startling. Well over a thousand carvings recorded, with counts running considerably higher as work continues, across dozens of sites, along a coastal belt hundreds of kilometres long, reaching from Maharashtra into Goa.

Some were known to locals all along, in the ordinary way that people know the odd features of the land they farm. Others were genuinely unrecorded. Almost none were understood as a connected body of prehistoric art until recently.

And they sit, overwhelmingly, on private land. No fences. No signs. No ticket office. A prehistoric masterwork in somebody's field.

Consider what that implies about the rest of the world. This is a substantial ancient tradition, on a populated coastline, in a country with a long archaeological history, and it went essentially unrecognised until people who lived there started looking. How many more are there, under fields nobody has surveyed?

The animals that should not be there

Now the part that has drawn attention beyond India.

The carvings show a striking range of creatures. Elephants, tigers, deer, boar, monkeys, peacocks. Marine life, including sharks, stingrays and turtles, which makes sense on a coast. Human figures and abstract geometric forms.

They also show a rhinoceros. And a hippopotamus.

Neither belongs to the Konkan coast of historical times. Their presence is not decorative fantasy. Rock artists across the world overwhelmingly depict what they encounter, and the rest of this assemblage is a faithful catalogue of local fauna.

So the carvings appear to record an environment that no longer exists. A wetter, richer, differently populated coast, with megafauna that has vanished entirely from the region.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly the situation in the Sahara, where the rock art of Tassili n'Ajjer shows hippos, crocodiles and cattle in what is now the driest desert on Earth. Two rock art traditions, on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean, made by peoples with no known connection to each other, both preserving the memory of a landscape transformed beyond recognition.

The rock remembers what the land has forgotten. And it does so in two places at once, which ought to make anyone wonder how many other landscapes are lying about their own past.

Who carved them, and when nobody can say

Here the honest answer is that we do not know, and the uncertainty is itself the most instructive part.

The absence of domesticated animals is a real clue. Farming societies tend to depict their cattle and goats, the animals they live alongside. These carvings show wild creatures, hunted creatures, the fauna of a landscape rather than a farmyard. Researchers therefore attribute them to hunter gatherer communities, before agriculture reached the region.

Dating is another matter entirely.

You will see a figure of around twelve thousand years. You will also see twenty thousand. Official listings describe a long span reaching from the Mesolithic to the early historic period, which is a range of many millennia. These are not small disagreements. They are the difference between one world and another.

This is not carelessness. It reflects a genuine and permanent problem. Carved rock offers almost nothing to date directly. There is no pigment with an organic binder, no charcoal, no bone in the groove. Archaeologists must rely on the style of the images, on the fauna depicted, on any datable deposits associated with the site, and on comparison with better dated material elsewhere.

Each of those is an inference. Stack inferences and you get a range, not a date.

So when you read a confident age for the Konkan geoglyphs, understand what you are being given. The broad picture, a very old, pre agricultural tradition recording vanished fauna, is well founded. The number is an argument.

We would say the same of every confident date attached to open air rock art anywhere on Earth, including the ones we have quoted ourselves.

Why they matter

The significance runs in several directions at once, which is unusual, and it is why the attention is warranted.

They are evidence of an environment. The rhinoceros and the hippopotamus, alongside the marine species, point towards a coastal landscape substantially different from today's, and towards fauna lost from the subcontinent.

They are evidence of a people. This region was, archaeologically, thin on recorded prehistoric settlement. The carvings insert a sophisticated, artistically ambitious human presence where the map was largely blank.

They are evidence of technique. Working laterite is not working limestone. These people developed the skill to manipulate a hard, difficult, iron rich rock at considerable scale, in the open, without shelter.

And they raise a question nobody has answered. The compositional confidence of an animal filled with animals. The assurance of a form fifteen metres across, cut by people who could never have stood far enough back to see the whole of it at once.

Who was it made for? It does not read from the ground. The same question hangs over the Nazca Lines, and it has never been satisfactorily settled there either.

We do not know. That is not a failure. It is the honest position, and it is more interesting than any invented answer.

The refinery

There is a reason the phrase global attention appears in the title of this article rather than global celebration.

A large proposed petrochemical refinery in the Barsu area of Ratnagiri district has been the subject of sustained concern, because the project's footprint sits in a landscape holding a substantial concentration of these carvings. Estimates of the number potentially affected have run into the hundreds. Researchers, conservationists and local residents have raised alarms. The state government has moved to protect certain of the carvings as protected monuments, and the sites appear on India's tentative UNESCO list.

We are not going to tell India what to do about a refinery. That is a decision for the people who live there, weighing heritage against employment and energy and the ordinary needs of a coastline full of human beings. We do not have to make that choice, and it would be cheap for a European travel company to lecture anyone about it.

What we will say is this. These carvings survived monsoon and sun for something like twelve thousand years, or twenty, depending on whom you ask. They were identified, mostly, within the last fifteen. The window in which humanity knows they exist and can still choose what happens to them is, so far, about a decade and a half wide.

Whatever is decided should be decided knowingly. Not by accident. Not by people who never knew the elephant at Kasheli was there.

And there is a hopeful thread. At one village, the community itself moved to protect its site, building a wall around it, securing access, taking responsibility. It is described as a rare case of a prehistoric site in India protected through the initiative of local people. Whatever happens elsewhere, that happened, and they did it themselves.

How POV Travel sees the Konkan carvings

We do not run expeditions to the Konkan coast, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you something.

We write about these carvings because they belong to the same story we chase across the Sahara, and because that story is among the most important the deep past has to tell. A people who are gone. A landscape changed beyond recognition. Animals in the art that no longer exist in the land. And a modern world that mostly did not know any of it was there.

The parallel with Tassili is exact and it is not a coincidence. Rock art is the only medium in which ordinary human beings, with no writing, no institutions and no intention of addressing us, left a direct record of the environment they inhabited. When the hippos in the Sahara and the hippos on the Konkan coast both turn out to be gone, that is not a curiosity. That is testimony, from two continents, about how completely a world can change while the record of it sits in the ground, unnoticed.

We question. We teach. We leave you with an opinion of your own.

So hold the two facts together and see what you make of them. Somebody carved a rhinoceros on the coast of India. There are no rhinoceroses on the coast of India.

Everything follows from that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Konkan petroglyphs?

Prehistoric rock carvings, also called geoglyphs, cut into the flat laterite plateaus of the Konkan coast in Maharashtra and Goa, western India. Over a thousand have been recorded across dozens of sites.

How old are they?

Genuinely uncertain. Estimates range from around twelve thousand years to twenty thousand or more, and official listings describe a span of many millennia. Carved rock is extremely difficult to date directly, so every figure is an inference.

Why are they significant?

They depict animals including rhinoceros and hippopotamus that no longer exist in the region, suggesting a very different past environment, and they reveal a substantial prehistoric human presence where little was previously recorded.

Who made them?

Most likely hunter gatherer communities before agriculture reached the region, since the carvings depict wild animals and show no domesticated species.

Are they under threat?

Yes. A proposed petrochemical refinery in the Barsu area has raised serious concerns about damage to a significant concentration of carvings. Some sites now have protected status.

See the green world for yourself

The Sahara was not always sand. The people who lived there painted the rivers, the herds and the hippos they saw with their own eyes, and their work still survives on the rock faces of Tassili n'Ajjer. To stand before it is to look at eyewitness testimony from a vanished world, and to wonder what a desert that was once green really tells us. That is the journey we take you on.

Explore the expeditions: Petroglyphs & Rock Art →