The Archaeology of Illegal and Illicit Economies
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
In the past 25 years, an interest in “informal economies” has grown across the social sciences, encompassing economic activities not (successfully) regulated by government. Archaeology has paralleled this interest primarily through studies of household and craft production; much of this work presumes rather than proves state control over quotidian exchanges. The smaller number of works on the riskier endeavors of piracy, smuggling, and prostitution, which we review here, underscores how weak the formal/informal duality is in application over the longue durée: Most markets are gray, not black or white. Instead of discussing the problematic category of the informal economy, we focus on illegal and illicit economies while demonstrating that the relationship between government and economy is highly variable, politically volatile, and socially embedded. We identify emerging trends in archaeology and address the hesitation to read archaeological deposits for clandestine activities by eliciting the distinct forensic patterns they leave in the material record.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| 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