Identification of Bird Species Used to Make a Viking Age Feather Pillow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A grave containing the remains of a wooden boat was discovered in 1934 under a low mound in a bog at Øksnes in the Vesterålen islands of northern Norway. The boat grave dates to the 10th century in the Viking Age, and grave goods placed in the boat include an iron axe, a cowhide in which the body was wrapped, and pillow remains consisting of feather stuffing and a wool textile cover. A microscopic analysis of the feathers from a subsample of the pillow fill identified three avian orders: Anseriformes (eider); Suliformes (cormorant), and Charadriiformes (unspecified gull). It was possible to make one species-level identification of Great Cormorant (<em>Phalacrocorax carbo</em>) and to narrow the gull types to the “white-headed” gull group. The sample was composed of a nearly equal mix of downy and pennaceous feather types. Downy feathers from gulls (Laridae) composed the majority of the material in this sample. While it is reported that feathers and down (assumed to be eider) were used in the Late Iron Age, this is the first successful attempt to identify bird species used in these materials and suggests that avian species identifications should be explored in other such burial items to enhance our understanding of human-wildlife interactions throughout Norse history.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".