Imagine Sudhir Risbud walking slowly across a warm, windless plateau of laterite in coastal Maharashtra. The rock underfoot is rust-red and coarse. Around him, the landscape stretches flat and quiet—a sea-facing tableau like hundreds of others that dot the Konkan coast. Risbud, a conservationist and naturalist from Ratnagiri, sees differently. His gaze doesn’t rest on the horizon. It scans the ground.
A faint curve catches his eye— a smooth depression, too deliberate. What looked like random lines resolve into form: a massive elephant etched into the plateau, nearly 50 feet long and 48 feet wide. Within its stony silhouette swarm dozens of smaller figures such as stingrays, fish, clawed animals, shapes part-familiar, part-enigmatic. An entire world, carved not into rock, but into time. These are the Konkan geoglyphs: ancient rock carvings spread across Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts. Over 200 such sites have been documented so far, often located on laterite outcrops a few kilometers inland from the sea. Most are unmarked, undocumented, and unguarded. You could walk right over them and never know.
But to those who look closely, they tell a story thousands of years old. Researchers believe these carvings date back to the Mesolithic period, created by prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities. The scale of some of the geoglyphs suggests a sophisticated understanding of form and symbolism.
But their creators left no written records, no inscriptions. Risbud stumbled upon his first geoglyph in 2012 during a birdwatching trek. Since then, he and his team at Nisargyatri Sanstha, a local conservation group, have mapped carvings, catalogued motifs, and spoken with landowners, many of whom were unaware of what lay beneath. They’ve turned villagers into guardians, training local youth as site guides and advocates.
Their efforts culminated in nine of the Konkan geoglyph sites added to UNESCO’s Tentative World Heritage List, marking the first step toward global recognition. At the heart of this grassroots effort is the Konkan Geoglyphs & Heritage Research Centre, a modest facility that functions more like a field station than a formal museum. Here, maps, satellite images, and photo archives are painstakingly assembled. More importantly, the centre serves as a bridge connecting researchers, conservationists, and villagers into a shared mission.
The geoglyphs feature marine life like sharks, turtles, rays. Their arrangement on wind-beaten rock faces suggests ritual, possibly cosmology, or territorial markers. Unlike petroglyphs found in caves or cliffs, these geoglyphs are inscribed on open, horizontal ground vulnerable to erosion, construction, and neglect. As Konkan’s coastal economy shifts toward tourism and infrastructure development, these carvings face increasing threats. Bulldozers have already claimed a few. Yet amid this fragility, there’s resilience. Rural communities are beginning to engage with their buried heritage.
The geoglyphs challenge our assumptions about prehistory blurring the line between art and map, memory and myth. And like the elephant in the rock, they ask us to take a step back to truly see.