Comments on <scp>M</scp>. <scp>K</scp>uhle and <scp>S</scp>. <scp>K</scp>uhle (2012): ‘<scp>H</scp>annibal Gone Astray? A Critical Comment on <scp>W</scp>. <scp>C</scp>. <scp>M</scp>ahaney <i>et al</i>., “The <scp>T</scp>raversette (<scp>I</scp>talia) Rockfall: Geomorphological Indicator of the <scp>H</scp>annibalic <scp>I</scp>nvasion <scp>R</scp>oute” (<i><scp>A</scp>rchaeometry</i>, 52, 1 [2010] 156–72)’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title of Kuhle and Kuhle's (2012) (hereafter K&K 2012) paper in Archaeometry appears to be mostly a tirade against the Traversette Route of Hannibal's Army, as originally favoured by Sir Gavin de Beer—a man possessed of singular scientific experience and near‐singular interest in Carthaginian history—in the mid‐part of the last century. The mere fact that Mahaney et al. (2010a,c) added to de Beer's corpus of evidence that Hannibal followed the southern route appears to have brought K&K (2012) to lodge not only a protest, but one of accusatory tone, stating that Mahaney et al. (2010c) had erroneously misinterpreted historical texts to prove the Col de la Traversette as the Punic Army col of passage into Italia. Aside from the fact that the tone of these allegations rises to a curious level, it is the intention of this discussion to put facts where they belong, rooted in what is known of the Hannibalic Invasion and what is inferred by the prevailing scientific evidence. It is important to note that there is not one preferred route as stated by K&K (2012), but three in fact (see Fig. 1 (a) in Mahaney et al. 2010c), and all have been discussed by a legion of historians (see, e.g., Freshfield 1886, 1899; de Beer 1969; Proctor 1971; Prevas 1998; Mahaney 2008).
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 | 0.006 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.037 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.092 | 0.053 |
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".