Sources and Early Indian History Questions and Answers

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.

Answer: A

Poduke was Arikamedu.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century Greek sailing guide, lists 'Poduke' among the market towns of the east coast of south India. Arikamedu, near Puducherry, excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in 1945, yielded Roman amphorae, Arretine ware and other imports, and is generally identified with Poduke.

The other ports are on the west. Barbaricum stood at the mouth of the Indus and Patala in the Indus delta region, while Sopara (Shurparaka, near Mumbai) was a port on the Konkan coast, so none can be an east-coast port of the Periplus.

Answer: C

Muziris was an ancient port city.

Muziris (Muchiri in Tamil sources) was the great port of the Chera country on the Malabar coast, near the mouth of the Periyar in present-day Kerala. Sangam poems describe Roman (Yavana) ships arriving with gold and leaving with pepper, and the Periplus and Pliny both name it. Excavations at Pattanam are widely taken to have located the site.

The other options are inventions: Muziris has nothing to do with cloth-making, string instruments or alloys. It belongs with Arikamedu, Kaveripattinam and Barygaza among the ports of the Indo-Roman trade.

Answer: B

The scholar is Max Muller.

Friedrich Max Muller worked backwards from the time of the Buddha. Allowing roughly two centuries each for the Sutras, the Brahmanas and the Mantra period, he placed the composition of the Rigveda around the end of the second millennium BC. That reasoning is the source of the conventional dating of the Rigveda to about 1500-1000 BC still used in textbooks.

The others argued for different dates. Hermann Jacobi, from astronomical references, pushed the Vedic period back to about 4500 BC, and Moriz Winternitz also favoured a much earlier date, around the middle of the third millennium BC. Oldenberg is not the author of the 1500-1000 BC scheme.

Answer: A

The key's answer is Bhaja.

The rock-cut Buddhist caves of the Western Ghats begin in the second century BCE, and Bhaja, near Lonavala in Maharashtra, is generally regarded as the earliest of them. Its chaitya hall still copies timber construction closely: the wooden beams of the roof and the inward-leaning octagonal pillars reproduce in stone what a wooden hall would have had.

Karle's great chaitya is later and far more developed, from around the first century CE. Kondane belongs to the same early group as Bhaja but is not the one usually named first. Ajanta's earliest caves date from the second century BCE too, but the site is famous above all for its fifth-century Vakataka-period caves and paintings.

Answer: A

The key gives Sangam literature. I could not trace this exact wording to a source, so the reasoning rests on the units themselves.

Ma and veli are Tamil land measures (a veli is a hundred kuli), and kalam is a Tamil grain measure. These are units of the Tamil country, and the Sangam poems are the earliest Tamil literature, so the key reads the Sangam corpus as the source that names them.

A temple inscription of the Chalukya king Pulakeshin II belongs to the Kannada and Sanskrit region of the Deccan, and Vakataka copper plates are Sanskrit grants from central India; neither is a natural home for Tamil measures. Option D, the Thirallaisthanam inscription, is a temple record whose reading I could not check; the key does not choose it. Treat the question as one where the key's attribution to Sangam literature could not be confirmed against a specific text.

Answer: C

The ayaka pillars belong to the stupas of South India.

Ayaka pillars are sets of five pillars standing on platforms projecting from the four sides of a stupa, facing the cardinal directions. They are a distinctive feature of the Buddhist stupas of the lower Krishna valley in Andhra, such as Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda, and are thought to stand for five key events of the Buddha's life.

The great stupas of Central India such as Sanchi and Bharhut have railings and gateways (toranas) instead, and stupas in the north and west do not have ayaka platforms either.