Reconstructing relationships among mortality, status, and gender at the Medieval Gilbertine Priory of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The varied relationships among status, gender, and mortality are complex, historically produced phenomena that shape people's lives and deaths in socially meaningful ways. Paleodemographic analysis coupled with acute sensitivity to site-specific context has the potential to move us toward a greater understanding of these experiences in the past. After considering the potential effects of migration and fertility on the age-at-death profiles of adult individuals interred at the Gilbertine Priory of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York (n = 200), it is asserted that these profiles primarily reveal expected and unexpected relationships among status, gender, and mortality in this Medieval context. Collectively, the long lives of religious-status males compared to other composite and gendered status groups suggest that they experienced a relatively comfortable existence despite periodic complaints of destitution. The postulated demographic advantage of high-status males did not materialize in the analysis, and a reevaluation of the skeletal evidence indicates that nearly 20% of these individuals died violently. Unexpectedly, moderate-status females shared a mortality profile similar to that of religious-status males and retained a demographic advantage over all other secular status groups. In contrast to the experiences of moderate-status females, low-status females had, on average, the shortest lives at St. Andrew's. This pattern is intimately linked to their restriction from crucial social and economic resources, and provides further evidence of their marginalization in York's wage-labor economy. Overall, these relationships suggest that traditional, highly stratified and gendered notions of Medieval status and mortality are not adequate for understanding the intricacies of everyday life and death at St. Andrew's.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.095 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".