On thin ice: problems with Stanford and Bradley's proposed Solutrean colonisation of North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across Atlantic ice: the origin of America's Clovis culture(Stanford & Bradley 2012) is the latest iteration of a controversial proposal that North America was first colonised by people from Europe rather than from East Asia, as most researchers accept. The authors, Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, argue that Solutrean groups from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula used watercraft to make their way across the North Atlantic and into North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). According to Stanford and Bradley, this 6000km journey was facilitated by a continuous ice shelf that provided fresh water and a food supply.AcrossAtlantic ice has received a number of positive reviews. Shea (2012: 294), for example, suggests that it is “an excellent example of hypothesis-building in the best tradition of processual archaeology. It challenges American archaeology in a way that will require serious research by its opponents”. Runnels (2012) is equally enthusiastic.
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 | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
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".