Colonel (Philip) Meadows Taylor, a British officer in the service of the Nizam, is credited with bringing Hire Benakal to scholarly attention when he documented the site and published the first known report on its megalithic tombs in 1835 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. His account described the hill slopes covered with stone-built burial monuments (especially dolmen-like chamber tombs, often with portholes), establishing Hire Benakal as a major prehistoric necropolis in what is now