Although some have their doubts about religious interpretations for what they call "esoteric archaeological finds,' nevertheless it is stated in this article that there is a strong probability that the structure and the stone represent a shrine to the goddess, or female principle, 'Shakti,' built by the group of final upper palaeolithic hunter/gatherers who were living at the site of Baghor I thousands of years ago. There is little doubt that a religious belief imparting a sense of awe and order and helping to control the relationships between human populations and the other components of their environment is highly developed among present-day hunter/gatherers. Such beliefs not only help to provide a feeling of unity stretching far beyond the hunting band itself, but they afford an ordered interconnection between the foragers and the spiritual processes which are looked upon as all-powerful forces influencing life and death.
The article (and see podcast mentioned below) reports on joint excavations by Allahabad University and the University of California, Berkeley, directed by G. R. Sharma and J. Desmond Clark, with the 1982 season supervised in the field by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and J. N. Pal. The site is Baghor I (24°35'2"N, 82°18'34"E), a terminal Upper Palaeolithic open-air site in the Son River valley at the foot of the Kaimur Escarpment, about 4 km northeast of Medhauli village, Sidhi District, Madhya Pradesh. While do firmly datable material was found at the site, the authors based on other evidence propose an age "probably between 9000 and 8000 BC."
In the final days of the 1982 season, while lifting artifacts, the excavators uncovered a roughly circular platform of sandstone rubble about 85 cm in diameter, at 35-40 cm below the surface, previously hidden beneath a spread of chert debitage. The surrounding artifact distribution consists of many small dumped concentrations up to 10 cm thick, separated by shallower, artifact-poor depressions.
At the centre lay a fragment of a natural ferruginous sandstone concretion whose weathering had accentuated concentric triangular laminations, banded from light yellowish red to dark reddish brown. Ten refitting fragments were recovered, reconstructing a naturally triangular stone roughly 15 cm high. Seven fragments came from at or near the platform's centre, two joining pieces from its periphery, and one had travelled about 90 cm to the south. The authors conclude the intact stone originally stood at the centre and later cracked apart along its laminations through ordinary weathering rather than deliberate breakage.
The interpretive weight of the paper rests on what the excavators saw in the surrounding countryside. About 1 km northeast of Baghor I stands the shrine of Kerai ki Devi, a roughly circular platform of sandstone and limestone rubble on which six concretionary stones with triangular or ellipsoidal laminations have been set upright. The stones are smeared with vermilion; the ground around them is littered with broken coconut shells, shorn locks of hair, potsherds and fragments of clay figurines. A headless figurine identified by one informant as Angari Devi, Goddess of Burning Coals (probably Elwin's Angar Mati of the Agaria), stands among them. Worshippers include Kol and Baiga tribals, caste Hindus, and local Muslim converts; the informant who explained the shrine's function was himself a Muslim.
Once alerted, the team found such shrines everywhere. Their own site watchman, a Kol, had built one to Kalika Mai beside his house: one large tabular laminated stone and three smaller ones, marked by a bamboo pole flying a red flag. In Medhauli village a larger shrine sits at the foot of a great neem tree, an earthen plinth capped by a stone slab and loaded with oddly shaped limestone and sandstone blocks, again including triangular and ellipsoidal concretions. The authors connect this directly to Crooke's 1896 description of Kol shrines in Mirzapur, where Bara Deo, also called Gansam, is worshipped at a plain platform marked by a red flag, often beneath a neem tree, and where "near his shrine is generally a rude stone representing Devi, some vague manifestation of the female principle in nature."
Crucially, the excavators probe how such stones are chosen. The watchman told them he climbed the escarpment and searched until he found the "right" stones, judging by shape and by the colours of the laminations, though he could not articulate the criteria. Shown the excavated stone, he and other local people pronounced it the right stone for the goddess. One indignant observer demanded to know why the team had broken a holy stone; told it had been buried for thousands of years, he touched his forehead to the ground before the platform. Meanwhile a similar but quadrangular concretion found on the slope west of the site was dismissed as just another rock. Selection, in other words, is real, local, and not reducible to raw material.
The wider ethnographic literature offers only loose parallels: the Gonds of Andhra Pradesh using "rounded stones" for the village mother Nat Auwal, the Oraon worshipping "roundish stones" for Chandi. The authors note that this specific stone type appears nowhere in the ethnographies of the Kaimur region, which they attribute to ethnographers not knowing to look. That said, the title includes a question mark and the authors remain cautious about inferring too much about the site however much circumstantial evidence points to the possibility that it was a neolithic shrine.
Another later article Socio-Ritual Artifacts of Upper Palaeolithic Hunter-Gatherers in South Asia by Dr. Kenoyer widens the frame to to ritual materials across Afghanistan, India and Pakistan from roughly 30,000 to 8000 BP {Before Present], and it opens with an explicit treatment of theoretical issues, the definition of terms, and the interpretive biases that attach to the word "ritual" in prehistory.
An engaging podcast with Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and host Alison Carter, an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Oregon behind the podcast series This Ancient Life, also tells the story of the discovery of the possible shrine in the words of a principal excavator and deals with all the issues of interpretation and the contemporary site context.