The Rise and Fall of the Transport Stirrup Jar in the Late Bronze Age Aegean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is generally accepted that Cretan transport stirrup jars were the preferred bulk liquid transport container of the Late Bronze Age Aegean, but the reasons behind their invention, relatively rapid dissemination and widespread use, and sudden disappearance are not well understood. To explain the rise and fall of the transport stirrup jar, this article offers a quantitative comparison of the distribution and production of Cretan transport stirrup jars in relation to the amphora, the other major transport container on the island, from the Middle Minoan II to the Late Minoan (LM) IIIC period. Based on these data, it seems that the mode of production and distribution patterns remained relatively consistent for amphoras, but production of the transport stirrup jar fluctuated greatly, rapidly reaching an apex during the LM IIIB period. In the LM IIIC period, however, the production and distribution patterns of both shapes changed, and the amphora was reestablished as the dominant transport container. I suggest that the comparatively short lifespan of the transport stirrup jar may be due to political intervention in the LM IIIA2–B periods. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of the sociopolitical underpinnings of changes in broad ceramic trends visible in the archaeological record.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".