Which of the following is/are the most distinctive artefacts of the Harappan Civilisation? 1. Steatite seal 2. Bricks of a standardised ratio 3. Gold bangles 4. Silver spittoon Select the correct answer using the code given below:

Correct — B, 1 and 2 only. Distinctive means diagnostic — an object that lets an archaeologist call a site Harappan rather than something else. The steatite seal, square, small and carved with an animal and a line of the undeciphered script, is the signature artefact of the civilisation and is found nowhere outside its orbit. The baked brick made to a fixed ratio of one to two to four in thickness, width and length is the other, because the same ratio recurs from Sindh to Gujarat to Haryana and implies a shared standard rather than local habit. Gold bangles are not diagnostic; goldwork appears in many ancient cultures and Harappan gold is modest in quantity. A silver spittoon is not a Harappan object at all.

• (a)1 only — Keeps the seal and drops the brick. The standardised brick ratio is as much a marker of the civilisation as the seal, and it is the one that shows the standardisation running across sites hundreds of kilometres apart.
• (c)2, 3 and 4 — Loses the seal, which is the single most recognisable Harappan artefact, and admits the spittoon, which belongs to a much later material culture.
• (d)1, 2 and 3 — Adds gold bangles to the two correct items. Gold ornaments are found at Harappan sites, but they are not distinctive — almost every literate Bronze Age culture left gold jewellery behind.

Archaeologists identify a culture by the objects that recur across its sites and do not occur outside them. For the Harappan civilisation that set is small and famous — seals of steatite, standardised baked bricks, cubical chert weights in a binary series, long carnelian beads, chert blades and a distinctive red-and-black painted pottery. The word distinctive in the stem is doing real work; it asks which objects mark the culture out, not which objects the culture happened to possess.

The standardisation is the deeper point. Bricks of a fixed proportion, weights in a fixed series and seals of a fixed form all point to conventions enforced over a very large area, which is why the civilisation is described as unusually uniform for the Bronze Age. The seals are mostly of steatite, a soft stone that is easy to carve and hardens when heated, and the commonest motif is the one-horned animal usually called the unicorn. The spittoon in option (d) is worth recognising as a deliberate anachronism — it is an object of much later, medieval Indian courtly life, and it is placed there to see whether a candidate will accept any object that sounds old.

• Steatite seals carrying an animal motif and a short line of the undeciphered Indus script are the signature Harappan artefact.
• Harappan baked bricks keep a ratio of about 1 to 2 to 4 in thickness, width and length across widely separated sites.
• Chert weights in a binary series, long barrel-shaped carnelian beads and chert blades are the other diagnostic objects.
• The Indus script remains undeciphered, so the seals are read as objects rather than as texts.
• Gold and silver were both worked by the Harappans, but neither the metal nor its ornaments distinguish the culture from its contemporaries.

• Reading distinctive as merely present — gold was present, but it distinguishes nothing.
• Accepting any object that sounds ancient; the spittoon is a much later form.
• Forgetting that the standardised brick is itself an artefact, and a diagnostic one.

Material-culture items ask what marks a civilisation out, so test each object against the question of whether its absence would make you doubt the identification.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Harappan seals were most commonly made of which material?

  • (a)Terracotta
  • (b)Steatite
  • (c)Ivory
  • (d)Copper

  Answer(b) Steatite — a soft stone that carves easily and hardens on heating, which suited the fine incised work.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The cubical weights of the Harappan civilisation were usually made of

  • (a)chert
  • (b)lead
  • (c)baked clay
  • (d)bronze

  Answer(a) chert — the weights follow a binary series and are found across the Harappan area.