early urban centres

Urban planning is reconstructed through spatial and architectural evidence. Measured buildings, street alignments, drainage lines, public structures, and site plans show how different parts of a settlement were arranged. Skeletons may inform historians about burial or health, while oral narratives and later religious texts are not direct plans of Harappan cities. Thus option B is the most useful evidence.

An archaeological survey is usually a systematic search and recording exercise that locates sites, surface materials and settlement patterns with limited disturbance. Excavation is a controlled removal of soil and cultural layers to recover buried remains and their contexts. Thus option A correctly distinguishes the methods; the other statements confuse their purposes or make absolute, false claims.

Archaeological documentation records where an object was found, the layer containing it, its orientation and its association with other remains. Because excavation removes deposits permanently, drawings, maps, photographs and daily notes preserve information that cannot later be observed directly. Option A is correct; tourism, attendance and making artefacts look new are not the primary purposes.

Archaeologists distinguish consumption or exchange from manufacture by examining the whole production assemblage. Manufacturing usually leaves debitage, broken pieces, raw materials, tools, or unfinished beads. If a site has only finished products and none of this waste, the beads may have arrived through exchange or been used there. Option B is the cautious conclusion; it is not absolute proof of origin.

The governing concept is functional spatial zoning in an urban settlement. When public buildings are concentrated in a central area and houses occupy peripheral areas, the distribution suggests that different parts of the city served different social and administrative purposes. This supports option A. It does not prove that every area had identical use, that planning was absent, or that the residential zone was religious.

The governing concept is the relationship between private household facilities and public urban infrastructure. When separate house drains join a common main drain, it shows planned coordination for collecting and carrying wastewater. This supports the idea of organised urban sanitation, not family ownership or ritual use. A natural channel would not by itself explain the systematic connection of domestic drains.