Etched in Stone: The Lost World of the Konkan Geoglyphs

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from standing on what looks like an unremarkable stretch of bare, reddish rock on India’s western coast, and only realising — often only once you see a drone photograph — that you are standing directly on top of an elephant the size of a basketball court.

This is the Kasheli geoglyph, in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district: a 13-by-18-metre outline of an elephant carved directly into flat laterite bedrock, with somewhere between 70 and 82 smaller animal figures worked into and around its silhouette — sharks, stingrays, tigers, monkeys, wild boar, rhinoceros, peacocks. Discovered only in May 2016, it is one of several hundred such carvings scattered across roughly 70 sites along the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and Goa, representing something genuinely unusual in the global story of prehistoric art.

Why "Geoglyphs" and Not Cave Paintings

Almost every famous piece of Indian prehistoric rock art — the Bhimbetka shelters, for instance — was made inside caves or rock overhangs, protected from weather and painted rather than carved. The Konkan sites are a different creature entirely. They are geoglyphs: images cut, scooped, and abraded directly into open, horizontal plateaus of laterite rock, known locally as sadas — exposed to sun, monsoon, and centuries of erosion, with no cave roof protecting them at all.

The Animals That Shouldn’t Be There

Here is where the story gets genuinely strange. Among the animals depicted across the Konkan sites are rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses — species that have no natural presence anywhere near the Konkan coast today, and which paleontological records indicate vanished from this part of India roughly 30,000 years ago. Their appearance suggests either a substantially wetter regional paleoclimate with marshlands, or communities preserving vivid generational memory of these megafauna.

The Barsu "Master of Animals" — And a Crucial Correction

A short distance from Kasheli, the Barsu plateau holds its own remarkable composition: a semi-abstract figure of a human, around four metres tall, flanked by two even larger tiger-like animals held firmly by the throat. Local villagers, before its significance was recognised, read the shapes as boats, christening the site Tarawacha Sada ("Boats Plateau").

How Old, Really? Dating Challenges in Laterite

When Maharashtra’s state archaeology director, Tejas Garge, first discussed the sites publicly, he described the 10,000 BCE estimate explicitly as "our first deduction" — a preliminary working hypothesis, not a laboratory-confirmed date. Other sources, citing the depicted extinct megafauna, push the horizon back toward 20,000 years, while UNESCO’s tentative-list dossier characterizes the tradition as roughly 12,000 years old. Laterite bedrock lacks organic inclusions and is notoriously difficult to date radiometrically, making absolute chronometry an open scientific challenge.

A Threat That Hasn’t Fully Resolved

Since 2015, a proposed $70 billion mega oil refinery project involving IOCL, BPCL, HPCL, and Saudi Aramco moved between locations in Ratnagiri district — initially at Nanar (abandoned in 2019 following fierce local opposition) and subsequently at Barsu-Solgaon, directly adjacent to significant petroglyph clusters. Archaeologists, environmentalists, and local mango and fishing communities have opposed the project due to irreversible damage to laterite bedrock, Alphonso orchards, and marine ecology. Following intense April 2023 protests and the tragic killing of journalist Shashikant Warishe, the refinery’s final location remains an unresolved negotiation.