Why move starchy cereals? A review of the isotopic evidence for prehistoric millet consumption across Eurasia
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractThe spread of agriculture is an important topic of archaeological research, but relatively few studies address the drivers behind the spread of specific species empirically. Here we use published isotopic data to consider whether the millets spread from their putative domestication centre in the East to western Eurasia for use as a staple food. We show that the consumption of significant quantities of millet was both far more sporadic than the earliest appearance of millet might suggest and delayed. This is not to say that millet was not consumed, rather that any consumption was below the level of isotopic detectability, and thus millet cannot generally be considered a staple. Nevertheless, individuals who regularly consumed millet occur both as typical members of their population and as unusual individuals. The reasons for this pattern open up new questions about, and avenues of research into, the spread of agriculture.Keywords: Eurasiaexchangeisotopesarchaeobotanymilletstarch AcknowledgementsThe authors are grateful to the European Research Council and Darwin College, Cambridge (EL) for financial support, and to members of the FOGLIP team for useful discussions of the manuscript. We are also thankful to Jessica Pearson and Sevi Triantaphyllou for providing copies of their publications.Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmma LightfootEmma Lightfoot, PhD Cantab, is a post-doctoral researcher in stable isotope analysis, currently Adrian Research Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge, and within the Food Globalisation in Prehistory Project.Xinyi LiuXinyi Liu, PhD Cantab, is a post-doctoral researcher in archaeobotany, currently within the Food Globalisation in Prehistory Project (ERC funded).Martin K. JonesMartin Jones, DPhil Oxon, has been George Pitt Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge since 1990.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it