Relations between rock art and ritual practice: a case study from eastern India

The ability of making art or artistic objects is one of the most important features of human being. The earliest evidence of artistic objects can be dated back to the Acheulian tradition of lower Paleolithic culture. Ethnographic evidences on the present day communities suggest that hunting, magic or ritual practices are the major causes behind the production of prehistoric arts. The present work attempts to find out relations between ritual practices and rock art production in a recently discovered prehistoric rock art site of eastern India. The supportive ethnographic data for the analysis of this rock art assemblage were largely unavailable. Due to this reason this study solely concentrates upon the arrangement, composition and context of the archeological assemblages and rock art itself to find out interrelations in between rock art and ritual structure. The outcome of the present work, with all its limitations, reveals that archaeological assemblages and context of a rock art site can give necessary information regarding the motives behind production of rock art.