Graffiti Games of Central Maharashtra: New Documentations, Revision and Theory

This paper documents ancient etched game boards across central Maharashtra, India, presenting findings from an ongoing fieldwork initiative that combines new discoveries with previously collected data. The sites examined include Buddhist rock-cut caves at Pitalkhora and Aurangabad, the Chalukya-era Shri Hemadpanthi Mahadev Temple in the Gautala Wildlife Sanctuary, and several temples around Lonar Crater Lake. The researchers catalogue boards of varied configurations, most commonly mancala-type layouts, along with Nine Men's Morris, 16 sepoys, and Tiger and Goats boards, and they highlight a distinctive "T"-shaped mancala variant at Lonar that the authors report has no known parallel elsewhere in India.

The study's central argument is that graffiti games in this region indicate a historically rich, regionally concentrated gaming culture, with boards placed on temple plinths, parapets, floors, and stepwells suggesting that play held ritual or communal significance. The authors report a distribution pattern in which mancala boards are densest in the central and eastern parts of the state and less frequent along the western coastal belt, a finding they describe as paradoxical given that coast's historical trade links with Africa and Arabia. They also observe a striking gap between the abundance of archaeological evidence and the near absence of living mancala traditions in present-day Maharashtra, which they interpret as a form of cultural memory loss.

The research relies on field surveys of specific sites, the revisiting of earlier collected data, comparison with historical gazetteers and scholarly literature, and consultation with specialists in game studies. The authors are explicit that their conclusions remain provisional, and they frame the open questions of origin, dispersal, decline, and the classification of the Lonar board as directions for future interdisciplinary and ethnoarchaeological work.