Archaeological Survey of India (institutional record)

The Archaeological Survey of India is cited here from its own institutional record as the government body responsible for archaeological research and protection of monuments across India, a role it has held since the colonial era and continued under the independent Indian state. That gives it strong standing as a primary source for facts about site designation, protected-monument status and excavation history, since it is literally the body that makes and records those determinations. Its limit is the same as any state institution describing its own mandate and findings: interpretive questions about a site's cultural or religious significance to a living community are better sourced to scholarship and to the communities themselves, since the Survey's institutional purpose is preservation and research administration rather than theological or ethnographic interpretation.