5 Metalworking and Ritualization: Negotiating Change through Improvisational Practice in Banda, Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Villagers of the 15th through mid–16th centuries C.E. in the Banda area of west central Ghana were living in times of change. The Saharan exchange networks that for several centuries had shaped the lives of earlier villagers were to give way by the late 17th century to Atlantic ones. Both offered opportunities (of access to desired goods) and perils (of enslavement). This paper focuses on a metallurgical workshop and the varied ritual practice associated with metalworking as gleaned from residues of stratified depositional practice. A variety of ritualized contexts and object configurations created a scaffolding “meshwork” that animated metallurgical practice, one that was improvised in relation to the broader context of opportunities and perils within which skilled artisans worked. These ritualized configurations were central to how craftsmen calibrated their practice in relation to the shifting global connections and moral terrains of their times.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".