The Domino Effect: Culture Change and Environmental Change in Newfoundland, 1500-1100 cal BP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between culture change and climate change in Newfoundland at 1500–1100 cal BP, a period during which two cultural groups lived there, Dorset Palaeoeskimos and Recent Indians. Dorset Palaeoeskimos were specialist seal hunters and Recent Indians practised a more generalized economy based on a mix of marine and terrestrial resources. We suggest that climate warming recorded in marine and lake proxy data from western Newfoundland, and dated at 1500–1100 cal BP, undermined the subsistence basis of a key Dorset site, Phillip’s Garden, at Port au Choix. We speculate that warming sea surface temperatures might have occurred throughout coastal Newfoundland and if so might have undermined Dorset seal hunters in all regions. We also link Dorset population collapse to the abandonment of Phillip’s Garden, which we hypothesize was a key site that facilitated social relations with Labrador. We argue that site abandonment disrupted important social networks, and as a result Dorset populations throughout Newfoundland became increasingly vulnerable in the face of increasing environmental stress on harp seal resources. At the same time, climate warming and the Dorset collapse positively impacted contemporaneous Recent Indian populations, enabling an increase in population and their expansion into areas vacated by Dorset.
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".