A Frontier Perspective on Paracas Society and Nasca Ethnogenesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has long been recognized that the Nasca culture (ca. A.D. 1–750) of the Peruvian south coast finds its roots in the Paracas society (ca. 800 B.C.–A.D. 1). Yet the social mechanisms responsible for the innovations that characterize the transition are poorly known. The southern Nasca region, which became the most dynamic region in terms of ceremonial life and intervalley integration, however, was never an important area of Paracas occupation. In this article I use literature on migration and frontier development to explain the genesis of Nasca society. Four phenomena that are common on historical frontiers seem to have been at play in the southern Nasca region: initial simplification of hierarchy, pioneer effect, “wealth-in-people,” and factionalism. Based on data from excavations at La Puntilla, a settlement that spanned the Late Paracas—Initial Nasca transition, I argue that the needs of interregional integration and cooperation following initial settlement of the frontier by Paracas populations and subsequent demographic growth prompted the genesis of Nasca society. The proposed long-term scenario also provides a context for later innovations in water management and agricultural intensification.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".