India · Earthen Construction; Vernacular Architecture; Architectural Craft
Bhunga (also spelled Bhonga, Bhoonga); Lippan kaam for the mud-and-mirror decoration
The building of bhungas: circular, single-room houses with thick mud walls and a conical thatched roof, found in the Banni and Pachham desert areas of Kutch, Gujarat. A family adds bhungas around a shared plinth as it grows. Walls are built of adobe blocks, cob or wattle-and-daub, or of stone in mud mortar; they are plastered with a mud mixture and often decorated with relief mud and mirror work (lippan). The roof is a cone of bamboo or timber on a central post, tied with rope and covered with palm branches and grass. The form is thermally stable in the desert and performed well in the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, where most damage was linked to poor materials or maintenance. Concrete 'pucca' houses are replacing them, and the craft is described as approaching extinction in places.
Risk level: Endangered · Not listed by UNESCO. No national or state listing found in the sources consulted.
A flat roof or intermediate floor made from teak or steel beams, thin high-density clay bricks laid on edge on diagonal lines and bonded with lime mortar, then covered with a thick layer of brick bats, lime mortar, gravel and sand, and…
Kotpad handloom is a cotton handloom weaving tradition from Kotpad block, Koraput district, Odisha — on the Chhattisgarh border — practiced by the Mirgan community for the Bondo, Kondh, and Gadaba tribal communities.
Zardozi is a metallic thread embroidery tradition using real gold and silver wire (zar = gold, dozi = embroidery in Persian) worked onto velvet, silk, or satin ground fabric using a hooked needle (aari) or hand-stitching technique.
Bastar iron craft is the traditional blacksmithing and decorative metalwork tradition of the Lohar (blacksmith) community of Bastar division, Chhattisgarh, practiced in the dense forested region historically governed by the Bastar kingdom.
Mata ni Pachedi (Gujarati: 'cloth behind the mother goddess') is a hand-drawn and block-printed narrative textile tradition of the Vaghari community of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Bastar Dokra is the lost-wax (cire perdue) bronze casting tradition of the Ghadwa community of Bastar, Chhattisgarh — one of two major Indian Dokra traditions, the other being the West Bengal/Odisha variant (CRAFT-0060).
The production of lime from burned oyster shells — a building material tradition unique to the Atlantic coast of France, where the abundance of oyster shells from centuries of oyster farming provided an alternative to limestone for lime…
The Bade is the multi-tiered ceremonial tower constructed for Balinese Hindu cremation ceremonies (Ngaben) — the most elaborate temporary ritual structure in any documented craft tradition.
The maintenance, shaping, and renewal of the formal topiary, bosquets (grove rooms), and clipped hedges of Versailles — the most complex formal garden in the world.
A masonry vaulting method in which two or more layers of thin fired bricks or tiles are laid flat, one over another, to form a thin, light vault.
Excavation and fitting-out of habitable spaces carved directly into the Loire Valley's tuffeau cliffs.
Ornamental plastering using plâtre de Paris (Paris gypsum plaster) — a fast-setting calcined gypsum unique to the Paris basin — for molded cornices, ceiling roses, and decorative panels.