The Mackenzie Inuit Whale Bone Industry: Raw Material, Tool Manufacture, Scheduling, and Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The bones of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) were used by Mackenzie Inuit groups in producing a number of items essential to transportation and procurement. However, the whale bone industry, and its relationship to Mackenzie Inuit economic and social systems, is poorly understood. A recently excavated archaeological assemblage from McKinley Bay, Northwest Territories, provides a record of intensive Nuvugarmiut whale bone tool manufacture, which can be used to reconstruct a reduction sequence. Bowhead bone reduction at McKinley Bay focused on ribs, which were transversely worked into large sections. Cortical blanks were isolated from central rib sections, but proximal and distal rib sections were treated directly as blanks and preforms for the production of large durable tools, such as harpoon heads, adze sockets, mattock blades, and picks. The intensive whale bone reduction at McKinley Bay was part of a broader gearing-up strategy focused on the manufacture and repair of sleds and harpoons needed for the late winter migration and spring seal hunt. More generally, because the whale bone industry was intimately related to the bowhead hunt and its proceeds, it may provide fundamental insights about key aspects of coastal whaling societies, such as social organization, redistribution, and inter-territorial trade.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".