Art & Culture Quiz: Archaeological Survey of India and Major Excavations

The correct answer is B, 1861. The Survey was set up in that year, in the first years of Crown rule after the revolt of 1857, with Alexander Cunningham as its first Archaeological Surveyor, and it was reorganised as a full department with Cunningham as Director-General in 1871. Option A is wrong because 1784 is the year in which Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal at Calcutta, the body that began the scholarly study of Indian antiquity but was a learned society, not a government survey. Option C is wrong because 1904 is the year of the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act passed in Lord Curzon's time. Option D is wrong because the Survey was nearly ninety years old by independence and simply passed to the new government, which later gave it the AMASR Act of 1958.

The correct answer is B, Alexander Cunningham. An engineer of the Bengal Engineers who had surveyed Sarnath and Sanchi long before the Survey existed, he was appointed its first Archaeological Surveyor in 1861 and its first Director-General in 1871, and he used the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang to identify ancient cities with the villages of his own day. Option A is wrong because John Marshall was Director-General from 1902 and is remembered for Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Taxila, not for founding the Survey. Option C is wrong because Mortimer Wheeler came as Director-General in 1944 and is remembered for stratigraphic method. Option D is wrong because James Prinsep was the scholar who deciphered the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, an achievement of epigraphy rather than of excavation.

The correct answer is C, the Ministry of Culture. The Survey is an attached office of that ministry, has its head office in New Delhi and divides the country into circles, each under a Superintending Archaeologist, which look after the monuments and sites declared to be of national importance. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Education runs schools, universities and bodies such as the NCERT and the UGC. Option B is wrong because the Ministry of Tourism promotes travel and runs schemes for visitor facilities at monuments, which is why candidates confuse the two, but it does not own or protect the monuments. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Home Affairs deals with internal security, the police and the census. The National Museum and the Sahitya Akademi also come under the Ministry of Culture.

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who dug at Harappa on the bank of the Ravi in 1921 while John Marshall was Director-General, and who ten years later became the first Indian to head the Survey. Option A is wrong because Rakhal Das Banerji excavated Mohenjo-daro on the Indus in 1922, the year after Harappa, and the pair Sahni with Harappa and Banerji with Mohenjo-daro is the most frequently asked match in this chapter. Option C is wrong because S. R. Rao worked at Lothal in Gujarat, where he found the dockyard, from the middle of the nineteen fifties. Option D is wrong because B. B. Lal excavated Kalibangan with B. K. Thapar and traced the Painted Grey Ware at Hastinapur and Atranjikhera, work of a later generation.

The correct answer is C, Lord Curzon. He found the Survey starved of money and nearly wound up, restored its budget, appointed John Marshall as Director-General in 1902 and carried the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, the first law in India that let the government protect a monument and stop its owner from damaging or exporting it. Option A is wrong because Lord Ripon is remembered for local self-government and the first Factory Act. Option B is wrong because Lord Lytton is remembered for the Vernacular Press Act and the Delhi Durbar of 1877. Option D is wrong because Lord Mountbatten was the last Viceroy, concerned with the transfer of power in 1947. Curzon's work on monuments, including the repair of the Taj Mahal, is the standard example of his interest in antiquity.

The correct answer is B, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, usually called the AMASR Act. It lets the central government declare a monument or an archaeological site to be of national importance, controls excavation and punishes damage, and its amendment of 2010 fixed the hundred metres around such a monument as a prohibited area and the next two hundred metres as a regulated area. Option A is wrong because the Act of 1904 was the earlier colonial law, now replaced. Option C is wrong because the Act of 1972 controls dealing in antiquities and art treasures and forbids their export, but does not protect monuments as such. Option D is wrong because the Treasure Trove Act of 1878 only governs the finding of buried valuables and who may claim them.

The correct answer is B, 100 metres. The amendment of 2010 declared the belt of a hundred metres around every centrally protected monument or site a prohibited area, in which construction and mining are barred except for repairs to the monument itself, and the next two hundred metres a regulated area, where building needs the permission of the National Monuments Authority. Option A is wrong because fifty metres belongs to a different subject, the No Development Zone of densely populated rural coastal stretches under the CRZ notification. Option C is wrong because two hundred metres is the width of the regulated area that lies beyond the prohibited one, so the two together make three hundred metres. Option D is wrong because three hundred metres is the sum of the two belts, not the prohibited area itself, and that is the trap in this question.

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who was appointed in 1931, having already made his name by excavating Harappa ten years earlier. Option A is wrong because Rakhal Das Banerji, who excavated Mohenjo-daro in 1922 and also wrote on the history of Bengal and Odisha, never became Director-General, although he is the other great Indian name of that generation. Option C is wrong because Amalananda Ghosh, who discovered Kalibangan, headed the Survey much later, in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Option D is wrong because B. B. Lal, the excavator of Kalibangan and Hastinapur, was Director-General in the nineteen sixties, well after Sahni. The sequence to remember is Cunningham first of all, Marshall from 1902, Sahni as the first Indian in 1931 and Wheeler from 1944.

The correct answer is B, Lothal, by S. R. Rao. Lothal lies in Ahmedabad district of Gujarat on the Bhogava, and the baked brick basin found there, connected to the river by a channel, is generally identified as a dockyard, which makes Lothal the port town of the Harappan world; it also yielded a bead factory, a warehouse and the earliest reported rice husk. Option A is wrong because Kalibangan in Rajasthan is famous for a ploughed field and a row of fire altars. Option C is wrong because Dholavira, on Khadir island in Kachchh, is famous for its chain of water reservoirs and the signboard of ten large signs. Option D is wrong because Rakhigarhi in Haryana is remembered simply as the largest Harappan site within India. Each site must be learnt with its single famous find.

The correct answer is A, V. S. Wakankar. Travelling by train through Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh in 1957, he noticed the rock formations rising above the forest, returned to examine them and found hundreds of shelters whose walls carry paintings of hunters, dancers and animals running from the Upper Palaeolithic to historical times; Bhimbetka was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003. Option B is wrong because H. D. Sankalia was the prehistorian associated with Nevasa and the Deccan College. Option C is wrong because J. P. Joshi is remembered for noticing Dholavira and for work at Surkotada. Option D is wrong because Robert Bruce Foote, called the father of Indian prehistory, found the first palaeolithic tool in India at Pallavaram near Chennai in 1863, almost a century earlier.

The correct answer is B, John Marshall. Appointed by Lord Curzon in 1902 and Director-General until 1928, he put Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the hands of Daya Ram Sahni and R. D. Banerji, saw that the seals and bricks from the two places belonged to one unknown civilisation and announced it in 1924, afterwards publishing the great volumes on Mohenjo-daro and excavating Taxila and Sanchi. Option A is wrong because Cunningham had died in 1893, though he had seen a Harappan seal without knowing what it was. Option C is wrong because Mortimer Wheeler reached India only in 1944 and later re-dug Harappa with better method. Option D is wrong because James Burgess was Director-General in the eighteen eighties and is remembered for the survey of western Indian cave temples.

The correct answer is A, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who came as Director-General in 1944 and insisted that a mound be dug layer by layer, each layer recorded in section with its pottery, so that the order of occupation could be read from the earth itself; he applied the method at Harappa, at Arikamedu near Puducherry, where he identified Roman trade pottery, and at Brahmagiri, and he trained a generation of Indian archaeologists in it. Option B is wrong because Daya Ram Sahni belonged to the earlier school of large clearance digging. Option C is wrong because Cunningham worked chiefly by survey, identification and trial trenching rather than by stratigraphy. Option D is wrong because G. R. Sharma, who excavated Kaushambi, came later and worked within the method Wheeler had already introduced.