Megalithic Tulunadu: Stones and Clay from Before the Written Word

Most of what this site tells about the beginnings of Tulunadu comes from stories: the paddanas, the legends of Bermer and Parashurama. This page is different. It is about things people left in the ground, which no storyteller shaped.

What “megalithic” means

Megalith means “large stone”. In India the word usually describes the burial monuments of the early Iron Age: circles and heaps of stones, stone boxes capped by a flat slab (a dolmen), urns, and chambers cut into rock. Such graves are found across the peninsula, with strong concentrations in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Most are dated somewhere between about 1500 and 500 BCE, and the graves often hold black pottery and iron tools.¹

Kerala, next door, has a large and well-studied collection. Dakshina Kannada’s own record is thinner and still being added to, so what follows is a snapshot, not a survey.

The cave near Ramakunja

In April 2022, a team from the Department of History and Archaeology at Mulki Sunder Ram Shetty College, Shirva, led by Prof. T. Murugeshi, reported a burial site in a cashew plantation near Ramakunja village in Kadaba taluk.²

The site is dated to about 800 BCE.² What caught the archaeologists’ eye was a circle about seven feet across, engraved into the hard laterite rock. Under it lay a hemispherical chamber cut into the rock, entered by a low side opening of about two feet, shaped like a doorframe and facing northeast. At its centre was an altar-like pit. Only a small amount of pottery was found inside, in red and black.²

Murugeshi called the circle probably the first rock engraving of the megalithic period found in Dakshina Kannada. He also said that marking a grave with a circle, instead of the usual stone circle, cairn or standing stone, may be a first for India.² That is his claim, made in a release to the press, and the engraving has not yet been weighed in a published study we could read.

The clay figures near Mudu Konaje

The second find is near Mudu Konaje, about 8 km from Moodabidri. The hillside once held nine dolmens, of which two survive. The historian Pundikai Ganapayya Bhat first reported the field in the 1980s.³

In 2023, eight clay figures from the site were reported, dated to roughly 800 to 700 BCE: two cattle, two peacocks, a horse, one object nobody could identify, a mother-goddess figure and a separate mother-goddess hand.³ Murugeshi, who took part in the exploration, said that terracottas like these give solid ground for studying the bhuta cult, the worship of the daivas that we see today at a bhuta kola.³

It is an archaeologist’s reading, and the gap is about 2,700 years, with eight figures and no record in between. It is a dated, local, expert-attributed clue, which is firmer than the general argument about a pre-Vedic Mother, and it is not a proven line from these clay figures to the daivas. The Mother Goddess page tells the wider story.

What the stones cannot tell us

Material like this says that people lived here and roughly when. It cannot say what language they spoke, what they believed, or whether they have any link to a group named elsewhere on this site. It is tempting to read a cosmology or an ethnicity into a stone circle.

Related

• The Mother Goddess, where the Mudu Konaje mother-goddess figure is discussed
• Bhuta Kola, the living worship the figures may or may not be connected to
• Bermer and Parashurama, where the story starts from legend instead of stone

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. IAS Gyan, “Megaliths” (accessed 7 October 2026): the meaning of “megalith”, the burial types, the 1500 to 500 BCE range and the regions. This is an exam-preparation site, a general summary only.
2. The News Minute, “Megalithic-era cave found in Karnataka’s Dakshina Kannada district” (14 November 2022), Udayavani, “Megalithic era burial site discovered in Dakshina Kannada” (26 April 2022), and Deccan Herald, “Megalithic era cave discovered in Karnataka’s Dakshina Kannada” (26 April 2022, only its summary line could be read): the site, the circle, the cave, the opening, the pit, the pottery, the date of about 800 BCE (The News Minute) and Murugeshi’s claims.
3. National Herald, “Unique terracotta figurines dating back to 700 BCE found in Dakshina Kannada” (12 September 2023, from a PTI report), and The Archaeologist, “Ancient Indian Terracotta Figurines Found at Megalithic Dolmen Shed Light on Karnataka’s Mystical Past”: the dolmen field, the eight figures, the date, Pundikai Ganapayya Bhat and Murugeshi’s reading.

Both finds come from press reports of an archaeologist’s releases; we found no published excavation report.