Hannibal and The Alps: unravelling the invasion route
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last two millennia all the proposed invasion routes followed by the Punic Army in 218 bc have been based on historical and topographic analysis provided by Polybius and Livy, the two main ancient sources. Because Polybius actually followed the invasion route 60 years after the trek he is considered the prime authority. Livy never left his residence in Padua and studied the invasion from sources no longer available to us. Neither source provides a name for the approach route and ultimate col of transit into Italia but Polybius does state the col is the highest in the Alps' tas hyperbolas tas anōtatō tōn Alpéon. Several other ancient authors including Varro, Servius and Strabo list the cols from south to north as Col de Larche, Hannibal's Pass, Col de Montgenèvre and Col de Mt Cenis, thus limiting Hannibal's Pass to one of the three major cols south of the Col de Montgenèvre, which are from south to north, Col Agnel, Col de la Traversette and Col de la Croix. Invoking available geological and environmental evidence tied to descriptions in the ancient literature it is apparent Hannibal, either by design or happenstance, approached the Alps through the Queyras, the ultimate col of passage being the Col de la Traversette at nearly 3000 m above sea level. The implications of this find for geoarchaeology are enormous and offer the opportunity to find artefacts that will undoubtedly offer new insights into the military culture of ancient Carthage.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".