Assessment of portable X-ray fluorescence analysis for the evaluation of slate procurement and exchange: a Maritime Archaic case study from Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prehistoric peoples of Newfoundland and Labrador, like many northern coastal populations, produced many of their stone tools from slate; however, the procurement and movement of this material in that Province and elsewhere has gone virtually unstudied beyond generalised typologies and macroscopic evaluation. This paper provides an overview of a recent study utilising non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) technology to analyse slates used by people of the Maritime Archaic tradition (ca. 8000-3200 BP) in Newfoundland and Labrador. Because pXRF is non-destructive, these instruments allow archaeologists to chemically analyse artifacts directly in non-traditional laboratory environments. Through the examination of 164 slate artifacts recovered from 50 sites from throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, we were successful at identifying broad regional patterns in slate distribution, as well as identifying preferred use of particular slate varieties in the production of specific artifact classes. Although limitations exist in the use of this technology, mostly having to do with the physical nature of the source material and the appropriate scale of research, this study demonstrates its potential in identifying broad use patterns and distribution of slate in ancient exchange systems.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".