A Thousand Years of Lost Hunting Arrows: Wood Analysis of Ice Patch Remains in Northwestern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discussions of the development of past hunting equipment generally focus on lithic and bone projectile points and foreshafts, as these are often the only elements remaining in archaeological sites. In the last 15 years, the archaeology of alpine ice patches has provided a unique opportunity to analyze hunting equipment over time and gain knowledge of the wooden elements on which the points are hafted. This paper describes the wood and morphometrical analysis of a collection of 27 arrow shafts from two ice patch regions of the western Canadian Subarctic. In both regions, two main categories of arrow shafts show the selection of specific pieces of wood, spruce (Picea sp.) on the one hand and birch (Betula sp.) on the other, with associated morphometrical characteristics. These shafts also share some characteristics that are distinct from those of Arctic and coastal arrow shafts. Shafts of pine (Pinus sp. sec. ponderosa) and hemlock (Tsuga sp.) were also identified in the southwestern Yukon Territory. The absence of correlation between the arrow shaft types and 14C dating raises the question of the significance of the arrow types and the potential for function, trade, or travel to explain the variation.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".