Ravi Korisettar, adjunct professor at NIAS, Bengaluru and honorary director of Robert Bruce Foote Sanganakallu Archaeological Museum, Ballari, has been chosen by the Madhya Pradesh Government for the Dr. Vishnu Sridhar Wakankar national award for 2018.
In an official communication sent to Mr. Korisettar, Commissioner of Archaeology, Archives and Museums, Madhya Pradesh, Shilpa Gupta has said that the date of the award ceremony would be communicated soon. The award includes a citation, a plaque, and a purse of ₹2 lakh.
Prof. Korisettar served in the Department of History and Archaeology, Karnatak University, Dharwad, from 1989 to 2013. His discovery of the youngest toba tuff (YTT), volcanic ash of Sumatra origin, in peninsular river deposits has been hailed as a ‘great discovery’ and its significance in dating the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic has brought the Indian subcontinent to the forefront of debate on expansion of modern humans out of Africa.
Prof. Korisettar is credited with discovery of a large number of prehistoric painted rock shelters in the Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh which led to a series of investigations on identifying suitable dating methods for rock art and understanding the non-material culture of the authors of these paintings.
He was co-editor of Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology of India (Geological Society of India,1995), The Rise of Early Human Behaviour in Global Context (Routledge,1998), Indian Archaeology in Retrospect (ICHR and Manohar [4 volumes], 2001/2), and a special issue of Quaternary International (vol. 258, 2011) and editor of Beyond Stone and More Stones (Vo. 1: 2017 and Vol. 2: 2018).
He has successfully applied the Public Outreach Archaeology as a strategy to prevent the loss of heritage and an initiative to launch heritage consciousness among the inhabitants in the neighbourhood of prehistoric archaeological sites.
Dr. V.S. Wākaṇkar in whose name the award has been instituted, was a great explorer, sculptor, painter and a committed social worker. He excelled in fine arts, sculpture, epigraphy, numismatics, art and architecture, religion, astronomy and the study of Sanskrit and vernacular literature.
