A longstanding consensus among archaeologists holds that the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished across what is now Pakistan and northwestern India from roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE, owed its remarkable urban infrastructure — sophisticated drainage networks, communal granaries, and standardized brick platforms — to the emergence of a centralized, bureaucratic state capable of mobilizing vast labor pools. This state-centric model has not gone unchallenged. Scholars drawing on recent excavations at Mohenjo-Daro and Dholavira have demonstrated that many of the hallmark engineering achievements once attributed to centralized planning were in fact constructed incrementally, over multiple distinct building phases separated by decades or even centuries of apparent neglect. The famed Great Bath, for instance, shows clear stratigraphic evidence of piecemeal modification rather than single-phase execution. Nor did the material benefits of these public works reach the population uniformly: residential quarters in the eastern sectors of Harappa lagged behind the citadel districts in access to water and sanitation by a measurable margin, a pattern that endured even as overall infrastructural quality rose during the city's mature phase. Yet to dismiss the role of coordinated civic institutions entirely would be to overlook the most telling evidence. The very standardization that makes Indus material culture so recognizable — the remarkably consistent brick proportions, the uniform system of weights and measures found across sites spanning nearly a million square kilometers — presupposes some form of sustained inter-urban coordination, even if it was decentralized and non-hierarchical in character. More tellingly, the absence of any archaeological signature of a ruling elite — no palatial complexes, no sumptuary burials, no monumental royal iconography — has led a growing number of researchers to conclude that the Indus civilization achieved its infrastructural sophistication not through coercive central authority but through collaborative governance distributed across merchant guilds, craft associations, and municipal councils. The very features once adduced as evidence of a bureaucratic state may, on closer inspection, testify to something more remarkable: a complex, literate, urban society that managed large-scale public works without the apparatus of top-down command.

The author mentions the "residential quarters in the eastern sectors of Harappa" primarily in order to

A. substantiate the claim that the benefits of Indus public works were distributed unequally across the urban population
B. illustrate the contrast between the construction techniques employed in outlying residential districts and those used in centrally located citadel areas
C. account for the gradual abandonment of Harappa's eastern sectors during the mature phase of the city's occupation
D. explain why the centralized-state model has persisted in the archaeological literature despite accumulating counterevidence
E. provide a specific instance of the kind of piecemeal, multi-phase construction that characterized Indus engineering projects



Which of the following best captures the function of the highlighted sentence in the context of the passage?

A. It elaborates on an assertion advanced in the immediately preceding sentence.
B. It restates the central claim that was introduced at the opening of the passage.
C. It calls into question the reliability of some of the data marshaled in support of the collaborative-governance interpretation.
D. It opens a rebuttal to the position advanced by those who challenge the state-centric model.
E. It places a limit on the revisionist critique articulated earlier in the passage.



The passage most strongly suggests which of the following about the collaborative governance model of the Indus Valley civilization?

A. It derived its central insights from the study of stratigraphic evidence at the Great Bath in Mohenjo-Daro.
B. Its plausibility rests in part on the conspicuous absence of archaeological indicators typically associated with centralized political authority.
C. It has been embraced by the majority of archaeologists working at Indus Valley sites over the past two decades.
D. It provides a more convincing account of the incremental construction of public works than does the state-centric model.
E. It was initially formulated as a direct response to the discovery of residential inequalities in water access at Harappa.