Archaeological excavations after the 1950s have unearthed boulder sections with additional inscriptions in Sanskrit and early Odiya, coins and parts of pre-8th-century Hindu temple and artwork from the Bhanja dynasty.

It is north of the Sita-nadi (Seta) river, midst farms punctuated by huge boulders and a forested hilly terrain.

The entire area including the temple and different rocks-group are named after the characters or events in the Hindu epic Ramayana (Ravana, Surpanakha, Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Lava, Kusa, others).

The other side of the mural remains preserved, though it was covered by tropical insect nests and cocoons at the time of re-discovery by archaeologists in mid 20th-century.

The lips and eye lashes are in white, as are the jewelry, adornments, flower in the king's hand, and the lower part of the woman's dress.

Deep red is the color of elephant's head and trunk, the horse, the traces of flying apsaras, the king and his attendant.

[1][2] The Ravanachhaya mural used a tempera method for painting, state Ramachandran and scholars based on chemical analysis of its fragments.

According to Joshi, it is unlikely to be the later ruler and the epigraphical studies of all inscriptions in Utkala region, along with other discoveries found at this and nearby sites, support the c. 4th to 5th-century dating.

[2] Other rock-shelter clusters near the Ravanachhaya mural site have historic inscriptions, some in early-Odiya as scripts were emerging out of the Brahmi, and others in variants that are now extinct.

The local Hindu community has preferred to leave it where it was discovered, which happens to be in front of a rock group historically called Surpanakha.

These attest to likely antiquity of the site, and that ideas about sculpture and painting likely diffused far from the northwest and central regions of India in the early centuries of the 1st-millennium CE.

Therefore, the presence of a partially surviving mural showing a king's procession is odd and likely a sign of its religious and political significance by mid-1st millennium.