Archaeological Gazetteer of Begusarai District

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Thanks go first of all to Shri Nitish Kumar, the honourable Chief Minister of Bihar, who has evinced a keen interest in the archaeological heritage of Bihar and has personally backed up the present project of documenting the antiquarian remains in Bihar.

I am also grateful to Dr. Bijoy Kumar Choudhary, Former Director, KPJRI, who had zeal to find out and highlight the antiquarian remains of Bihar. It was he who undertook the project of exploring the archaeological and historical remains in modern Bihar and began publishing the find outs in the form of 'Archaeological Gazetteers of Districts'. This volume forms a part of the series.

Special thanks to our dedicated team of Research Investigators and District Coordinators who carried on with the long and arduous exercise with great sincerity. Their names figure in each volume of the gazetteer at the inner cover page. I would particularly like to mention Shri Ajit Kumar Prasad, a senior archaeologist of Bihar, for examining the potsherds collected from each site, and offering his written comments on them.

The Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute (KPJRI) undertook the exploration and documentation of the antiquarian remains in Bihar in June 2007. The methodology adopted for this work is as follows: the field-work was done by Research Investigators who extensively explored the villages, supposed to have some remnants of the past and filled up a comprehensive printed data-sheet for each antiquarian find-spot. The Investigators were specially appointed for the project, and they underwent a training programme comprising lecture sessions, exposure to different kinds of antiquities and potsherds, correct ways of reading topo-sheets and filling up the data-sheets and pilot explorations of archaeological sites with experienced archaeologists. A ten-page data-sheet was developed to have a comprehensive documentation of the archaeological features of a given site, and the entries of D- form prepared by ASI were incorporated into it. But several new entries such as legends and myths associated with a site or with an archaeological feature were made, as it was realized that these provided insights into unraveling the historicity of a site. The filling up of the contact details of the local people was made obligatory with the hope that a networking with them would be important for preserving and protecting the archaeological sites at the local level.