The Vacant Quarter Revisited: Late Mississippian Abandonment of the Lower Ohio Valley
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea that a substantial portion of the North American midcontinent centered on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers confluence was largely depopulated around A.D. 1450–1550—Stephen Williams's “Vacant Quarter” hypothesis—has been generally accepted by archaeologists. There has been, however, some disagreement over the timing and extent of the abandonment. Our long-term research along the Ohio River in southern Illinois's interior hill country has yielded a substantial corpus of late Mississippian period radiocarbon dates, indicating that depopulation of the lower Ohio Valley occurred at the early end of Williams's estimate. Furthermore, the abandonment was a widespread phenomenon that involved Mississippian groups living in remote settings, as well as along major drainages. Although causes for the Vacant Quarter are still debated, evidence from other regions indicates that regional abandonment by agricultural groups was not a unique event in the Eastern Woodlands.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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