Unravelling settlement history at Ndondondwane, South Africa: a micro-chronological approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to conduct high (micro-) resolution spatial-temporal analysis of deposits at Iron Age sites is a significant problem in southern African archaeology. The consequence is that temporal analyses are therefore rarely conducted at a finer level than the ceramic phase within a larger period (e.g. Early Iron Age). This leads to the common practice of comparing all deposits at sites from the same phase as if they were contemporaneous. One potential solution to this problem involves integrating ceramic, stratigraphic, and chronometric data. In this paper, we use radiocarbon, stratigraphic, and ceramic stylistic data to identify a pan-site chronological sequence for the Early Iron Age site of Ndondondwane. This is achieved by synchronizing the superimposed stratigraphic sequence and associated radiocarbon data from the centre of the site with evidence for micro-temporal changes in ceramic style. The micro-temporal stylistic changes allow the correlation of stratigraphically displaced and spatially isolated deposits across the site into a pan-site chronological sequence. The combination of all three data sets increases the ability of archaeologists to detect change at smaller temporal scales that are normally conflated into a single-period occupation. This micro-temporal approach allows the ethnographically documented process of settlement establishment, growth and abandonment to be more closely monitored in the archaeological record. Furthermore, ethnoarchaeological study of ceramic production indicates that generational change in ceramic style should be discernable in archaeological assemblages from short-term occupation Iron Age sites. Our micro-chronological analysis at Ndondondwane supports this hypothesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".