Bibliographic record
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".