Distinguishing between naturally and culturally flaked cobbles: A test case from Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Distinguishing between naturally and culturally produced, simply flaked cobbles has been a problem for proponents of a pre‐Clovis occupation in the Americas. Several sites in Alberta have been assigned a pre‐Clovis status based on the presence of simply flaked cobbles found in Late Pleistocene till deposits. Historically, these types of assemblages have been assigned a cultural status based on subjective criteria and appeals to the analyst's expertise. To determine the archaeological status of two such assemblages from Alberta (Varsity Estates and Silver Springs), they were compared to a known natural assemblage and two known cultural assemblages. Chi‐square testing was used to evaluate several lithic attributes. Only those attributes that statistically differentiated between natural and cultural assemblages were used for further analyses. All cobbles were then scored using these attributes. A point was awarded when a statistically significant attribute of human‐manufacture was present. These points were then totaled, providing an aggregate score for each cobble. These scores were plotted to determine whether the test assemblages had closer affinities with the known natural or known cultural assemblages. The results indicate that the proposed pre‐Clovis assemblages have closer affinities to known natural assemblages than to cultural assemblages. Our results suggest that these sites provide no evidence for a pre‐Clovis occupation in the Americas. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".