Undergraduate Design Thesis  |  Spring 2016

Location: Bhimbetka, Madhya Pradesh, India
Mentors: Madhurima Waghmare, Shhilpi Sinha

Awarded Gold Medal

Core zone: 1,892 hectares
Buffer zone: 10,280 hectares
Total: 12,172 hectares

Cultural landscapes can be explained as a way of seeing and interpreting the natural and built heritage as a continuum in time and space, where countless population groups have left their marks, and in some cases, continue to do so today. India, as a country where people’s lives are still invariably rooted within their culture and ecosystem, has a proliferation of such landscapes.

Bhimbetka is a rich cultural repository, and has conserved many aspects of ancient human history in terms of culture, socio-economic values and lifestyle of the Mesolithic period. With the existence of such rich culture comes a need to conserve it, preserve it and understand its relevance.

This thesis explores how to achieve and maintain the precarious balance of protecting and safeguarding these unique cultural resources, while enhancing the utilization of these resources for enjoyment of the visitors and sustaining socioeconomic development of the hosting communities.

This calls for the development of a cohesive management and conservation strategy, that

(a) sufficiently serves as a representative of the cultural landscape,
(b) helps in the dissemination of knowledge about the myriad aspects of the heritage site,
(c) encourages the local accumulation of scientific wealth on the subject,
(d) facilitates both visitors and researchers with infrastructure for their purpose of visit, and
(e) develops the presence of the cultural landscape within the tourist circuit.

All of this has been proposed to be established with the initiation of an Interpretation Centre, which aims to be able to do justice to the multifaceted nature of the site and cater to diverse categories of tourists and researchers alike.

Explore my futher research on Rock-Art here.