Iron Age breastfeeding practices in Britain: Isotopic evidence from Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present here the results of carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis of bone collagen undertaken on all skeletal remains of infants and young children below the age of 6 years (n = 34) from the internationally important British cemetery site at Wetwang Slack in East Yorkshire (middle Iron Age, ca. 4th to 2nd centuries BC). The aim of the study is to investigate infant diet, with particular reference to breastfeeding and weaning practices, and to compare the data with previously published studies of archaeological populations, particularly in the context of the variation in data patterns to be seen between sites. The skeletal remains from Wetwang Slack form the only prehistoric collection in the UK, prior to the Romano-British period, with sufficient individuals in this age group to make such an isotopic study viable alongside associated adults and older children. The data are compared in detail with published data from two other sites, one from 19th century Canada and the other from Medieval Britain. The results suggest an unusual situation at Wetwang Slack, with neither the nitrogen nor the carbon isotope ratios conforming to expectations when compared with the putative mothers. We discuss how these data compare with the expectation for breastfed infants and we interpret the divergence in this case to be due to restricted breastfeeding and the early introduction of supplementary foods.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".