CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 76 of 120

Correct — A, Sukkur and Rohri Hills. The Rohri hills are a scarp of limestone running south-east of Rohri in Upper Sindh, between the Indus on the west and the Nara on the east, about 40 km long and 16 km wide. The limestone carries nodules of chert, a hard fine-grained silica rock that fractures cleanly and takes a razor edge, and the hills are dotted with quarry pits and flaking floors — the debris of blade-making on an industrial scale. Chert blades struck here travelled out to Harappan settlements across Sindh, including Mohenjo-daro, which is why the hills are described as a factory site rather than merely a source. The other three options are all real raw-material regions of the Harappan world, but each supplied something else: Khetri gave copper, and the Chagai and Baluchistan hills lie west of the Indus in a different geological and cultural zone.

• (b)Khetri in Rajasthan — Khetri is the copper belt of the Aravallis and was the principal Indian source of copper for the Harappans and their neighbours. It is a metal region, not a chert-blade factory.
• (c)Chagai Hills — The Chagai hills lie in western Baluchistan near the Iranian border — a long way from Sindh, in a zone associated with mineral and metal sources rather than with mass blade production for the Indus settlements.
• (d)Hills of Baluchistan — Too vague and in the wrong place. The Baluchistan highlands matter to the story of early farming at sites such as Mehrgarh, but the blade factories that supplied Sindh sat on the Indus itself, at Rohri.

The Harappan civilisation ran on long-distance supply of raw materials: copper from Khetri and Baluchistan, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, carnelian from Gujarat, shell from the coasts, and stone for tools from wherever a suitable outcrop lay. Chert was the workhorse. Long parallel-sided blades struck from prepared cores served as knives, sickle elements and craft tools, and they were produced at the quarry and distributed outwards rather than made at every settlement.

Sindh in the stem is the clue that fixes the answer. Two of the four options lie well west of the Indus in Baluchistan, and a third is in Rajasthan far to the east; only Sukkur and Rohri sit on the Indus itself, in Upper Sindh, exactly where a supplier to Sindh's settlements ought to be. The wider lesson is about specialised production: mass manufacture at a raw-material source, with the finished blades moving out along river routes, is one of the clearest signs of a specialised economy in the Indus material, and it is why archaeologists call the Rohri hills a factory site. Note that the paper says limestone and chert blades — the chert occurs as nodules within the limestone formation, so the two names describe one geology.

• The Rohri hills are limestone scarps in Upper Sindh, southeast of Rohri, between the Indus and the Nara, about 40 km by 16 km.
• Chert is a hard fine-grained silica rock that flakes to a very sharp edge, which is what made it the preferred tool stone.
• The hills carry archaeological sites spanning the Palaeolithic onwards, including flint artefacts of that early period.
• Khetri in Rajasthan was the main Indian copper source used in the Harappan period.
• Long parallel-sided chert blades served as knives and sickle elements across Harappan Sindh, including at Mohenjo-daro.

• Choosing Khetri because it is the best-known Harappan raw-material site; Khetri supplied copper, not chert blades.
• Overlooking the word Sindh in the stem, which rules out the Baluchistan options.
• Assuming every settlement made its own stone tools; the Rohri evidence is of production concentrated at the source.

As a site-to-material identification, or inside a matching set pairing Harappan raw materials with their source regions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Khetri in Rajasthan is associated with the supply of which raw material to the Harappan settlements?

  • (a)Copper
  • (b)Lapis lazuli
  • (c)Chert
  • (d)Shell

  Answer(a) Copper — the Khetri belt of the Aravallis was the principal Indian copper source of the period; lapis came from Afghanistan and shell from the coasts.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following best explains why chert was the preferred stone for Harappan blades?

  • (a)It is soft and easily ground
  • (b)It fractures cleanly and takes a very sharp edge
  • (c)It resists heat better than other stones
  • (d)It could be melted and cast

  Answer(b) It fractures cleanly and takes a very sharp edge — a fine-grained silica rock that can be struck into long parallel-sided blades.