MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 93 of 100

Correct — option (1), Bagor. Bagor lies on the left bank of the river Kothari in the Bhilwara district of Rajasthan, and it is described in the archaeological literature as the largest Mesolithic site in India. Two features give it that standing. The first is the scale and manner of its excavation: it was dug horizontally rather than in narrow trenches, which means that a large area of the living surface was exposed at once and the plan of the settlement could be read — where people slept, where they worked stone, where they buried their dead — instead of merely the sequence of layers. The excavation is associated with V. N. Misra, who published his account of the site as a late Mesolithic settlement of north-western India in 1973. The second is what the site contains. Bagor yielded a very large industry of microliths, the tiny blades and geometric forms of chert and quartz that define the Mesolithic everywhere and that were hafted in wood or bone to make composite tools; it has three cultural phases, of which the earliest is dated by radiocarbon to roughly the fifth to the third millennium before the present; it yielded five human skeletons that had been deliberately buried; and it is one of the two sites always cited in Indian textbooks for the earliest evidence of the domestication of animals, the other being Adamgarh. That last point is what makes Bagor historically important rather than merely large. The Mesolithic is the period in which the hunting and gathering way of life begins to shift: the tools become smaller and more specialised, the sites show longer occupation, and animals begin to be kept rather than only hunted, which is the first step towards the food-producing economy of the Neolithic. A site that shows a settlement plan, burials and animal domestication together is therefore a document of that transition, which is why it is examined. Note the geography in the stem, because it does all the eliminating: Rajasthan. Of the other three names, one is in Madhya Pradesh, one is in Uttar Pradesh, and the third is not the Mesolithic settlement of Rajasthan that archaeology names. The answer to be marked is option (1).

• (2)Adamgarh — Adamgarh is a genuine and important Mesolithic site, and it is offered here because it belongs in the same sentence as Bagor in every textbook — the two together are cited for the earliest evidence of the domestication of animals in India. It fails on geography alone. The Adamgarh hills lie in Madhya Pradesh, near Hoshangabad on the Narmada, and are known for prehistoric rock shelters and rock paintings as well as for the lower palaeolithic and mesolithic implements excavated there. They belong to the central Indian complex of rock shelter sites of which Bhimbetka, also in Madhya Pradesh and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the most famous. A candidate who has learnt the pair 'Bagor and Adamgarh' as a single phrase for animal domestication and has not attached a State to each name will find this option indistinguishable from the keyed one, which is precisely the discrimination the question is testing.
• (3)Pratapgarh — Pratapgarh is the name of a district in southern Rajasthan, and that is what makes the option superficially attractive in a question whose stem names Rajasthan: the candidate recognises the name as Rajasthani and stops there. But recognising a place in the right State is not the same as recognising the site archaeology is asking about, and the large, horizontally excavated Mesolithic settlement of Rajasthan named in the literature is Bagor in Bhilwara district. The name carries two further confusions worth clearing away. There is a Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh as well, so the name does not even identify a region reliably; and in a Maharashtra paper the name will call up Pratapgad, the hill fort in Satara district where Shivaji met Afzal Khan in 1659, which belongs to a different millennium and a different syllabus altogether. Testing an option by asking what it is actually known for, rather than whether the name feels right, disposes of it.
• (4)Chopni-Mando — Chopani Mando is a real and much-studied site, but it is in Uttar Pradesh, not Rajasthan: it lies in the Belan river valley in the Prayagraj district, about seventy-seven kilometres from Prayagraj, and was excavated by G. R. Sharma in 1967 and again in 1977. Its importance is that it shows a three-phase sequence running from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic to the Neolithic on one site, which makes it a document of the transition from food gathering to food production; the excavation revealed circular and oval hut floors with hearths, microliths, and hand-made cord-impressed pottery, and remains of pottery and rice have been reported from about the seventh to the sixth millennium BCE. It is therefore the answer to a different question — the site showing the transition to food production in the Belan valley — and a candidate who knows why it matters will also know that it does not sit in Rajasthan.

The Mesolithic, the middle stone age, is the phase between the Palaeolithic hunting economy and the Neolithic farming economy, broadly the period after the end of the last glaciation when the climate became warmer and wetter and the distribution of plants and animals changed. Its diagnostic artefact is the microlith: a very small blade or geometric form, often no more than a centimetre or two long, made of fine-grained stone such as chert, chalcedony, agate or quartz, and designed to be set in a haft of wood or bone, singly or in rows, to make arrows, sickles and composite knives. The economy remained one of hunting, fishing and gathering, but the sites are larger and occupied for longer, burials appear, and at some sites the bones of sheep, goat and cattle indicate that animals were being kept. In India the principal Mesolithic sites form a map worth memorising: Bagor and Tilwara in Rajasthan; Langhnaj in Gujarat; Adamgarh and Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh; Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha, Damdama and Chopani Mando in Uttar Pradesh. Bagor, on the Kothari in Bhilwara district, is the largest of them and was excavated over a wide horizontal area, yielding a microlithic industry, five deliberate human burials and evidence of animal domestication across three cultural phases. Chopani Mando in the Belan valley is the site that best shows the sequence from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, with hut floors, hearths, cord-impressed pottery and rice remains.

Prehistory appears in MPSC papers in a compact and predictable form: the site, its State, its river or valley, and the one thing it is famous for. The Commission almost never asks about interpretation, because the interpretations are contested and the marking would be disputable; it asks instead for the pairing of a site with a place. That makes the whole topic a matter of a single table, and the table is short — perhaps twenty sites across the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic, of which the Maharashtra ones, Inamgaon, Daimabad, Jorwe and Nevasa, get extra attention in this State's papers. The construction used here is the standard one: a stem naming a State and four sites of which three are in other States or are not sites at all. It rewards the candidate who has learnt each name with a State attached and punishes the one who has learnt a list of names in isolation. It is also worth noting a difference between the two printed columns of this paper on this question: the Marathi block asks for the large site of the Mesolithic, मध्याश्म, culture in Rajasthan, while the English block asks which of the following is a large Mesolithic site in Rajasthan. The sense is the same and the answer is the same.

• Bagor lies on the left bank of the river Kothari in Bhilwara district, Rajasthan, and is described as the largest Mesolithic site in India; it was excavated horizontally, so that a wide area of the settlement was exposed.
• The excavation of Bagor is associated with V. N. Misra, who published his account of it as a late Mesolithic settlement of north-western India in 1973; the site has three cultural phases, the earliest dated by radiocarbon to roughly the fifth to the third millennium before the present.
• Bagor yielded a large microlithic industry and five deliberately buried human skeletons, and it is one of the two sites — with Adamgarh — cited in Indian textbooks for the earliest evidence of the domestication of animals.
• Adamgarh is in Madhya Pradesh, near Hoshangabad, and is known for prehistoric rock shelters and paintings as well as for lower palaeolithic and mesolithic implements.
• Chopani Mando lies in the Belan valley in Prayagraj district, Uttar Pradesh, was excavated by G. R. Sharma in 1967 and 1977, and shows a sequence from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, with hut floors, hearths, microliths, cord-impressed pottery and rice remains.

• Learning the phrase 'Bagor and Adamgarh' for animal domestication without attaching a State to each; Bagor is in Rajasthan and Adamgarh in Madhya Pradesh
• Choosing an option because its name sounds like a place in the State named in the stem, as Pratapgarh does, rather than because it is a known archaeological site
• Confusing Chopani Mando in the Belan valley of Uttar Pradesh with the Rajasthan sites; it is the site of the Palaeolithic to Neolithic sequence, not a Rajasthan Mesolithic settlement
• Confusing the prehistoric Pratapgarh of the option with Pratapgad fort in Satara district, where Shivaji met Afzal Khan in 1659

Prehistory is examined by MPSC through site identification almost exclusively: name the State of a site, name the site of a State, name the river valley, or name the site associated with a particular kind of evidence such as the earliest domestication of animals or the earliest evidence of rice. Occasionally the question asks for the tool type of a period or the sequence of the ages. A single table therefore covers the topic — site, State, river or valley, period, and the one distinctive find — and it should be extended to include the Chalcolithic sites of Maharashtra, which appear more often in this Commission's papers than the prehistoric sites of other States. The wrong options in such questions are usually real sites in the wrong State, as two of the three are here, so the State column of that table is the one that earns the marks.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bagor, described as the largest Mesolithic site in India, is situated on the bank of which river and in which district ?

  • (a)The Banas, in Udaipur district
  • (b)The Kothari, in Bhilwara district
  • (c)The Luni, in Barmer district
  • (d)The Belan, in Prayagraj district

  Answer(b) The Kothari, in Bhilwara district. Bagor lies on the left bank of the Kothari in Rajasthan and was excavated horizontally, exposing a wide area of the settlement; it yielded a large microlithic industry, five deliberate human burials and evidence of the domestication of animals across three cultural phases. The Belan valley in Prayagraj district of Uttar Pradesh belongs to Chopani Mando, the site that shows a sequence from the Palaeolithic through the Mesolithic to the Neolithic.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs of Mesolithic site and State is correctly matched ?

  • (a)Adamgarh — Rajasthan
  • (b)Langhnaj — Uttar Pradesh
  • (c)Chopani Mando — Uttar Pradesh
  • (d)Bagor — Madhya Pradesh

  Answer(c) Chopani Mando — Uttar Pradesh. The site lies in the Belan river valley in Prayagraj district and was excavated by G. R. Sharma in 1967 and 1977, revealing circular and oval hut floors with hearths, microliths and hand-made cord-impressed pottery. Of the other pairs, Adamgarh is in Madhya Pradesh near Hoshangabad, Langhnaj is in Gujarat, and Bagor is in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan — each option pairs a real site with the wrong State, which is the standard construction of this format.