Dorset Palaeoeskimo Skin Processing at Phillip's Garden, Port au Choix, Northwestern Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines artifactual and palaeo-limnological evidence of sealskin processing associated with Phillip’s Garden, a Dorset Palaeoeskimo site at Port au Choix in northwestern Newfoundland. We propose that harp seals were hunted from Phillip’s Garden as much for skins as for meat and fat, and that processing sealskins was the first step in the important activity of making clothes, boots, and other items. We outline the steps and tools involved in sealskin processing throughout the northern circumpolar world, and we identify specialized skin-processing tools in the Phillip’s Garden tool assemblage. Sealskin processing is also inferred from pollen and chironomid data from Bass Pond, adjacent to Phillip’s Garden. Disturbance across pollen taxa is evident at 2200– 1400 cal BP, and anomalous salinity values are evident at 2000–1400 cal BP. We argue that these are connected to Palaeoeskimo activities at the pond, in particular Dorset sealskin soaking and tanning. This study shifts our perception of Dorset activities at Phillip’s Garden away from a narrow focus on seal hunting and the site itself and broadens our view to include more of the multiplicity of day-to-day human activities that took place within a larger cultural landscape that included Phillip’s Garden and Bass Pond.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".