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Record W1615879666

The origins of the twentieth century Zulu beer vessel styles

2005· article· en· W1615879666 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Frank Jolles

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicArchaeology and Rock Art Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZuluContext (archaeology)HistoryPotteryPoliticsQuarter (Canadian coin)Style (visual arts)Ancient historyHuman settlementEthnic groupArchaeologyAnthropologySociologyLawPolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The term Zulu is placed in its historical, ethnic and regional context. Twentieth century beer vessels are then classified according to four main types: imbiza, uphiso, ukhamba and umancishana, which also correspond to the use to which they were put. Within these types five main regional styles based on form and surface decoration emerge: Phongolo, Nongoma, Hlabisa, Melmoth-Eshowe, Lower Thukela and Msinga. The styles are illustrated by means of a classified database of 106 beer vessels. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, stylistic boundaries were frequently blurred due to relocations of people and the increased mobility of the pot making families. There is no evidence that the characteristic blackened Zulu ceramic ware existed before the middle of the nineteenth century. It is absent from excavations of late eighteenth century settlements. During the disruptions of the early decades of the nineteenth century, beer baskets were in common use as drinking vessels. It is likely that the distinctive regional stylistic features of the ceramic vessels developed in the nineteenth century Shepstonian locations in Natal (from about 1848) and the redefined tribal regions of the former Zulu kingdom after the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. It is suggested that the reasons for the spread of this distinctive pottery are to be sought in the socio-political and religious transformations of the time.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.023

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.290
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations15
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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