A Three-Dimensional Model of a Thule Inuit Whale Bone House
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The semi-subterranean whale bone house is one of the most distinctive features of Thule Inuit culture in the Canadian Arctic (A.D. 1000–1600). An understanding of how these remarkable dwellings were designed and built has been hindered by measurement and recording techniques restricted to two dimensions. Determining how the unusual shapes and sizes of whale bone elements would have influenced the strength of the roof frame and the volume of the house's interior requires a three-dimensional point of view. We constructed a three-dimensional computer model of such a house by first employing laser scanning technology to create a digital model of a North Atlantic Right Whale skeleton on display at the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts. Individual elements from the digital model were used in combination with archaeological data to construct an accurate representation of a Thule whale bone dwelling. Constructing a model in a virtual world is analogous to building one in the real world. Consequently, we gained a deeper understanding of the design principles used by Thule builders, and conclude that the development of an architectural tradition based upon whale bone may be among the greatest technological achievements in Arctic prehistory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".