Each set of questions in this section is based on the passage. The questions are to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. For some of the questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer; that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the questions.
In order to understand the development of Gangetic Valley plains, scholars have traditionally relied primarily on evidence from historical documents. However, such documentary sources provide a fragmentary record at best. Reliable accounts are very scarce for many parts of Northern India prior to the fifteenth century, and many of the relevant documents from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries focus selectively on matters relating to cultural or commercial interests.
Studies of fossilized pollens preserved in peats and lake muds provide an additional means of investigating vegetative landscape change. Details of changes in vegetation resulting from both human activities and natural events are reflected in the kinds and quantities of minute pollens that become trapped in sediments. Analysis of samples can identify which kinds of plants produced the preserved pollens and when they were deposited, and in many cases the findings can serve to supplement or correct the documentary record.
For example, analysis of samples from a bay in Jammu has revealed significant patterns of cercal-grain pollens beginning by about fourth century. The substantial clay content of the soil in this part of Jammu makes cultivation by primitive tools difficult. Historians thought that such soils were not tilled to any significant extent until the introduction of the wooden plough to India in the seventh century. Because cereal cultivation would have required tiling of the soil, the pollens evidence indicates that these soils must indeed have been successfully tilled before the introduction of the new plough.
Another example concerns flax cultivation in Jammu, one of the great linen-producing areas of India during the sixteenth century. Some aspects of linen production in Jammu are well documented, but the documentary record tells little about the cultivation of flax, the plant from which linen is made, in that area. The record of sixteenth-century linen production in Jammu, together with the knowledge that flax cultivation had been established in India centuries before that time, led some historians to surmise that this plant was being cultivated in Jammu before the sixteenth century. But pollens analyses indicate that this is not the case; flax pollens were found only in deposits laid down since the sixteenth century.
It must be stressed, though, that there are limits to the ability of the pollen record to reflect the vegetative history of the landscape. For example, pollen analysis cannot identify the species, but only the genus or family, of some plants. Among these is turmeric, a cultivated plant of medicinal importance in India. Turmeric belongs to a plant family that also comprises various native weeds, including Brahma Thandu. If Turmeric pollen were present in a deposit it would be indistinguishable from that of uncultivated native species.