History & archaeology · Long read · 10 min read

Houses of the Sages: The Dolmens of Marayoor

On the granite hills of the Anchunad valley stand stone chambers built by Iron Age people some two thousand years ago. What they were, who built them, and why they are vanishing.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Climb the bare granite hill above the Pambar river at Kovilkadavu, a few kilometres from Marayoor town, and you walk among small stone houses. Each is a box of rough slabs set on edge, roofed with a single great stone. Some stand alone; others sit in rows, shoulder to shoulder, as if lined up along a street. A few have a neat round hole cut through one wall. Goats graze between them, children take short cuts across the rock, and most travellers on the Munnar–Udumalpet road drive past without a second look.

These are the dolmens of Marayoor, known locally as muniyara, "the chamber of the sage". They are among the largest groups of megalithic monuments in Kerala, and they are a direct link to the people who lived in these hills in the Iron Age, around two thousand years ago.

What is a dolmen?

A dolmen is the simplest of stone buildings: upright slabs, usually four, set in the ground to form a chamber, with a large flat capstone laid across the top. The word comes from Breton, and similar monuments are found from Ireland to Korea. In South India they were built by communities of the megalithic (Iron Age to Early Historic) period, mainly as places for the dead.

At Marayoor the builders used what the hills offered in plenty: granite. The rock here splits naturally into slabs along its sheets and joints, and many dolmens stand directly on the bare rock that supplied them. Survey descriptions record several forms. Many are small chambers about 70 to 90 cm high; others reach about 1.4 to 1.7 m; and at least one double-length dolmen is about 3.5 m long. Some have more than one chamber. Others have a laterite base lined with granite slabs. One has a circular hole about 28 cm across leading into an underground chamber.

That hole, often called a port-hole, is a well-known feature of South Indian dolmens. Archaeologists usually read it as an opening through which remains or offerings could be placed after the chamber was closed, which suggests that some dolmens were visited and reused, not simply sealed and forgotten.

Part of a South Indian story

Marayoor's dolmens belong to a much larger tradition. Across peninsular India, from the Deccan to Kerala, Iron Age communities buried their dead in stone monuments of many kinds. Kerala has some forms found nowhere else.

Grave goods from Kerala's megaliths include iron daggers, swords, axes, sickles and farming tools, beads, and distinctive pottery, especially black-and-red ware, fired so that the inside and rim turn black and the outside red. Taken together, they show farming, herding, metalworking communities with ideas about death elaborate enough to justify moving tonnes of stone.

Recorded study of these monuments in Kerala began in the colonial period. J. Babington's report on a megalithic burial at Chataparamba near Kozhikode, published in 1823, is credited as the first published report of a megalithic excavation in India.

Why here?

The Anchunad valley is a natural gateway. It lies in a gap between the Anamudi massif and the Palani hills, drained by the Pambar river, and it opens east towards the plains of Tamil Nadu. It sits in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, so it is drier and more open than the forests around Munnar, with fertile valley floors, grazing land and an endless supply of splitting granite. For early farming communities that was close to ideal.

The valley's later history shows the same pull. The five villages of Anchunad, "the five lands" (Marayoor, Kanthalloor, Keezhanthur, Karayur and Kottakudi), trace their families to Tamil-speaking settlers from the Madurai country, and the valley is still known for Marayoor jaggery and Kerala's only natural sandalwood forest. People have been drawn to this valley for a very long time.

▶ Video: The Making of Marayoor Jaggery

How Marayoor's GI-tagged jaggery is made from sugarcane in the valley north of Munnar. More in our video gallery

What the spade has found

For most of their history the Marayoor dolmens were described but not excavated. That changed in 2011–12, when the Kerala-based research group SARCH and the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Pune, excavated a dolmen at Marayoor and surveyed the valley.

The most important result was not a burial but a village. In Kerala, archaeologists have studied hundreds of megalithic graves but have found very few places where the builders actually lived. A survey published in 2013 by N. Nikhil Das, P. P. Joglekar and R. K. Mohanty reported two likely habitation sites in the valley:

• Nachivayal, at about 950 m, on a plot locally called Nacholi, about 300 m from a burial ground of cist graves. A small trial trench a metre deep yielded several kilograms of pottery (red ware, red-slipped ware, black-and-red ware and coarse black ware), iron fragments, quartz and glass beads, terracotta ear ornaments, sling balls, a gaming piece and grinding stones.
• Alampetti, inside today's Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, about 500 m from the Vazhathura dolmens. Pottery here included polished black ware, and a tiny reddish-brown paste bead of the Indo-Pacific type, a kind of bead traded widely around the Indian Ocean in early historic times.

Nearby, at Manjapattikoda, the team recorded an intact burial urn about 1.1 m across at the base, with six more capped urns close by. The authors were careful to call their dating preliminary: some of the Alampetti pottery looked pre-Christian era, while some Nachivayal sherds resembled later, early historic material. But the main point was clear. The people buried in Marayoor's stone chambers lived, farmed and made things a few hundred metres away, and the valley was a settled landscape, not just a cemetery.

The same studies also recorded the damage. At Nachivayal, decades of paddy, sugarcane and areca cultivation had cut terraces through the site and churned up pottery, and new houses had been built on its slope.

Sages, Pandavas and a goddess in a stone box

People of the valley did not wait for archaeologists to explain the dolmens. The name muniyara reflects a widespread belief that the chambers were the cells of munis, holy men who lived and meditated in them. Elsewhere in South India, similar monuments are linked to the Pandavas of the Mahabharata; colonial writers in the early nineteenth century already recorded that megaliths were attributed to the Pandavas or to celestial beings. In Marayoor it is also often said that the Pandavas, and Rama and Sita, passed through these hills during their exile.

Some of the old stones are still sacred. The Kannimara shrine at Marayoor is a reused dolmen that now serves as a place of worship. Kannimara is also the name of one of the deities of the Hill Pulaya (Mala Pulayan) community of the valley, whose gods are traditionally represented by stones, and one of the protected dolmen groups lies within a Hill Pulaya settlement at Kanakkayam. For the people who live among them, the dolmens are part of a living landscape, not just ruins. (We write about the Hill Pulaya and the other communities of these hills in our story People of the High Ranges.)

Paintings on the rocks

The valley's hills also hold some of Kerala's most important rock art. The best-known sites are:

• Ezhuthu Guha, "the cave of writing", in the Koodakkad sandalwood reserve at about 1,000 m, with roughly 90 painted motifs. It has been badly vandalised since it became widely known.
• Attala, west of Marayoor town, an east-facing rock shelter at about 1,500 m with more than 90 motifs, painted mainly in white. Recorded figures include a deer-like animal (perhaps a tahr), a horse, an elephant with a rider, humped oxen, a drummer, a swordsman and a group of men on a platform or raft.
• Kovilkadavu, a small panel of about ten motifs on the slope above the Pambar, close to the dolmens.
• Manala, near the Alampetti settlement in Chinnar, showing a deer and a human figure.

Local tradition reads some of the scenes as episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Archaeologists have not yet securely dated the paintings, and it is not established that they were made by the same people who built the dolmens, although the two often share the same hills. Horses and riders, in particular, may suggest that at least some of the paintings belong to a later period.

A heritage disappearing in plain sight

The greatest threat to the dolmens is not time but people. Some have been vandalised or broken up; others have been lost to cultivation, roads and new houses, as the archaeologists working at Nachivayal recorded. In 2017, after several dolmens in the Marayoor–Kanthalloor area were vandalised or destroyed, guards were appointed to watch over them, as The Hindu reported. Fences around some sites are poorly maintained, and unregulated tourism, including vehicles driven over the outcrops, adds to the wear.

There is no reliable published count of how many dolmens once stood in the valley or how many survive, and figures quoted online vary widely. What is certain is that every dolmen lost takes with it evidence that cannot be recovered: the position of a pot, a bead, a fragment of bone, the shape of a chamber. Unlike a temple or a fort, a dolmen cannot be rebuilt once it has been dismantled.

Marayoor is about an hour and a half's drive north of Munnar, past Eravikulam National Park and the Lakkam waterfalls. Sandalwood forest, jaggery sheds and stone chambers some two thousand years old make it one of the most rewarding day trips in the high ranges. If you would like to plan one with us, call or WhatsApp our team.

Long before the tea, the sandalwood and the jaggery, people in this valley were carrying stones up the hill for their dead. Their houses for the departed are still standing. Whether they stand for another two thousand years is up to us.

Note on sources: no full excavation report or firm radiocarbon dates for the Marayoor dolmens had been published when this article was written. Dates here are the general range for South Indian megaliths. Counts and measurements come from the survey literature listed below and may change as research continues.