Sources and Early Indian History Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The site is Naikund.

Excavations at Naikund in Nagpur district, a Megalithic (Vidarbha Iron Age) site, uncovered an iron-smelting furnace with tuyeres and slag, the clearest evidence of how Megalithic people produced iron in Maharashtra.

Mahurjhari, Borgaon and Junapani are also Megalithic sites in Vidarbha, known for stone-circle burials and iron objects, but the smelting furnace was found at Naikund.

Answer: D

The key's answer is Kuntasi.

Kuntasi, in Rajkot district of Gujarat, was a small Harappan coastal settlement and manufacturing centre with a fortified enclosure and workshops for beads and copper; no Harappan cemetery has been reported there.

The other three have Harappan burials: Farmana in Haryana has one of the largest Harappan cemeteries excavated, Rakhigarhi has a cemetery whose skeletons yielded ancient DNA, and Surkotada in Kutch has pot burials and cist graves.

Answer: A

Rakhigarhi is in Hissar District of Haryana.

Rakhigarhi lies in Hisar district, on the plain of the dried Ghaggar-Chautang (Drishadvati) system. With its several mounds it is one of the largest Harappan sites known. Excavations by Amarendra Nath and later by Vasant Shinde have shown its long sequence and cemetery.

Rohtak district of Haryana is a neighbouring district, which makes it the trap. Muzaffarnagar (with Mandi and Alamgirpur nearby) is in Uttar Pradesh, and Rupnagar (Ropar) in Punjab is a different Harappan site.

Answer: B

In the Vedic texts vrihi means Rice.

Rice is called vrihi in the later Vedic texts, such as the Atharvaveda and the Brahmanas, which reflect the spread of settlement into the rice-growing middle Ganga valley. The word is the source of the name for rice in several languages.

Barley is yava, the main cereal of the Rigveda, and wheat is godhuma. Moong (green gram) is mudga. None of them is vrihi.

Answer: C

In the Vedic Samhitas jana denotes a Tribe.

The Rigveda speaks of the five janas (pancajanah) and of tribes such as the Bharatas, Purus and Yadus. The jana was the tribe, the basic political unit of the early Vedic people, and the king was its protector (gopa janasya). The word janapada later meant the territory where a tribe settled.

A family is the kula or griha, and caste in the sense of jati developed later. Jana does not mean a dialect.

Answer: C

The one that is not a megalithic type is Topi-kund.

Megalithic burials and memorials are classified by their stone structure. A menhir is a single upright stone; a dolmen is a chamber of upright slabs roofed by a capstone; a cairn circle (printed here as 'Crain circle') is a burial under a heap of stones ringed by a circle of boulders. All three are standard types in Indian megalithic studies.

'Topi-kund' is not a recognised type name. The Kerala megalith it resembles is the topikal or hat-stone, a dome-shaped capstone over a burial; the option bends that name into one that no classification uses, which is why the key marks it as the odd one out.

Answer: B

The method is vertical excavation.

Vertical excavation cuts deep through a limited area so that the layers of a site are exposed one above another. Read from the bottom up, those layers give the cultural sequence: which occupation came first and what followed, the basis of a site's relative chronology.

Horizontal (open-area) excavation, by contrast, exposes one period over a wide area to show house plans and settlement layout. A trial trench is a small preliminary cut to test whether a site is worth digging. The quadrant method is a way of dividing a round mound or barrow for excavation, and archaeological sampling is a strategy for choosing what to dig, not a method that reveals sequence.

Answer: B

The site is Dholavira.

Dholavira, on Khadir island in the Rann of Kachchh, Gujarat, is known for an elaborate water-management system: a series of large rock-cut and masonry reservoirs inside the city walls, fed by dams and channels built across two seasonal streams, the Mansar and the Manhar. In an arid region this stored rainwater was the city's lifeline.

Banawali in Haryana is known for its fortification and a terracotta plough model, Surkotada in Kachchh for its fortified citadel and the disputed horse bones, and Kuntasi in Saurashtra as a small coastal craft and trading settlement. None has a reservoir system comparable to Dholavira's.

Answer: A

The workshop is reported from Lothal.

S. R. Rao's excavations at Lothal in Gujarat uncovered a coppersmith's workshop with crucibles, moulds and finished copper objects, alongside the site's bead-makers' workshop, dockyard and warehouse. Lothal is therefore the textbook example of Harappan copper-working.

The other sites are known chiefly for other things. Kuntasi is a small coastal settlement in Saurashtra associated with bead-making and trade; Surkotada in Kachchh is known for its fortifications and the debate over horse remains; and Madina is not one of the sites the standard accounts name for Harappan metal-working. The question asks for the site where the copper workshop is reported, and that is Lothal.

Answer: B

The eastern limit was Alamgirpur.

Alamgirpur, on the Hindon river in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, is the easternmost site of the mature Harappan civilisation. Its excavation in 1958-59 pushed the known extent of the civilisation into the Ganga-Yamuna doab.

The other options do not fit. Banawali (Haryana) and Ropar (Punjab) are Harappan sites well to the west of Alamgirpur. Chirand, in Bihar, is a Neolithic and Chalcolithic site, not a Harappan one, so it cannot mark the civilisation's limit.

The usual set of extremities to remember: Alamgirpur in the east, Sutkagen Dor in the west, Manda in the north and Daimabad in the south.