Anthropology and History in the Southern African Iron Age
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An ongoing collaborative initiative by southern African archaeologists and historians has generated two publications: the book Five Hundred Years Rediscovered and a special issue of African Studies. Overall, the initiative is positive. The reviews of research histories in both publications, especially in African Studies, take strongly critical positions on archaeology. The critiques, directed generally at anthropological approaches in archaeology, and specifically at ceramic and settlement pattern studies, claim that such approaches fail to generate a socially dynamic – or historical – past. It is nevertheless clear that the critiques rest upon flawed understandings of the concepts criticised. In the case of ceramics, the authors equate style entities, or facies, with social and political homogeneity. In the case of settlement patterns, the authors argue that so-called ‘structuralist’ models produce an ahistorical past devoid of social dynamism. This article responds to these flaws, first considering the complex relationship between material-cultural entities and people, and secondly showing how settlement models do indeed represent sets of socially dynamic relationships. Further, in advocating an alternative ‘historicised’ approach some scholars seem not to appreciate either the challenge or significance of archaeological data, and perhaps give aspects of the oral record undue precedence. Keywords: Southern African Iron Ageanthropological archaeology and historyceramicssettlement modelsidentity Acknowledgements Carolyn Thorp, Jeremy Hollmann (both KwaZulu-Natal Museum), Tom Huffman, Justine Wintjes (both Wits), Peter Mitchell (Oxford), Tim Maggs (UCT), Jannie Loubser (Stratum Unlimited, USA) and Leon Jacobson (McGregor Museum) made comments on earlier drafts. Robert G. Mason (Royal Ontario Museum) identified the Sawad sherd, and Marilee Wood (Wits) the Zhizo bead from KwaGandaganda. I thank them all.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it