Rock Fortifications: Archaeological Insights Into Precontact Warfare and Sociopolitical Organization Among the Stó:lō of the Lower Fraser River Canyon, B.C.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whether or not traditional centralized leadership existed among the central Coast Salish of the Gulf of Georgia-Puget Sound Regions is a topic of ongoing interest and debate among archaeologists, social anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and Aboriginal communities. Recent findings in the lower Fraser River Canyon of British Columbia of a unique class of archaeological site—rock fortifications, newly identified on the Northwest Coast—present an opportunity to address this discussion. Description of these features and analysis of their situation within the physical and social landscapes of the Fraser Canyon provides insight into the nature of Stó:lō warfare and defensive strategy. I propose the existence of a multivillage defensive network aimed at regulating access to the entire “Canyon watershed” rather than simply defending individual settlements. I present a “corporate family group” model of sociopolitical organization through which this defensive system operated—representing a minimum level of intercommunity governance traditionally known to the Sto:Lō of the Gulf of Georgia Region. This proposition provides an alternate view to the long-held belief that individual households were the traditional centers of economy, and by extension, of political authority among the Aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast. These results affect the current understanding and reconstruction of traditional expressions of Stó: Lō identity engrained in sociopolitical organization.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".