Preceramic Occupations in Belize: Updating the Paleoindian and Archaic Record
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Evidence from preceramic Paleoindian and Archaic time periods in Belize has been recorded over the past quarter of a century by a number of projects. This paper summarizes previously published information and presents new archaeological data in bringing the hunting-and-gathering and itinerant horticultural millennia of this region into a more accurate and comprehensive perspective than has been presented to date. The Paleoindian period includes influences from North as well as South America, with settlement preferences shown for river valleys and near-coastal margins. Cave sites hold particular promise for yielding new and well-preserved remains from this early period. The Archaic, beginning as early as 8000 B.C., is poorly dated until 3400 B.C. and was probably characterized by mobile hunter-foragers. The Late Archaic includes two facets, the Early (3400–1900 B.C.) and the Late (1500–900 B.C.) Preceramic, and represents the first appearance and gradual spread of cultivation together with habitat modification. The period beginning around 1500 B.C. shows intensifying maize cultivation, apparently mobile populations, and also the emergence of well-defined stone tool traditions that trend into the early Middle Preclassic. Ceramics seem to appear unevenly from ca. 1200 to 900 B.C., when the Cunil and Kanocha complexes in western Belize and Swasey sphere in northern Belize are reported.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".