‘A River of Knives and Swords': Ritually Deposited Weapons in English Watercourses and Wetlands during the Viking Age
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the deposition of weapons in English rivers and wetlands during the Viking Age. Such finds have been extensively studied in Scandinavia but have rarely been academically discussed in Britain. It can be argued that the arrival of the Scandinavians in ninth- to eleventh-century Britain precipitated a marked increase in depositions of a ‘pagan’ nature. Despite deep-rooted, institutionalized Christianity having dominated England for some time, it is possible that pagan beliefs were dormant but not forgotten, with the Scandinavian arrival triggering their resurgence. Weapons form a large number of ritual depositions, with seventy deposits being mapped geographically to identify distributional patterns across the landscape. It is suggested here that ‘liminal' depositions in Viking Age Scandinavia provide an interpretative model for these finds. Given the context of endemic conflict and territorial consolidation within which they may have been deposited in England, this material can shed new light on attitudes to landscapes subject to conflict and consolidation.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 it