Instruments of Change: Late Dorset Palaeoeskimo Drums and Shamanism on Coastal Bylot Island, Nunavut, Canada
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The only known evidence of Dorset Palaeoeskimo drum use ever documented was salvaged decades ago along with thousands of other Late Dorset Palaeoeskimo artifacts from an eroding coastal site (PfFm-1) at Button Point on Bylot Island, Nunavut (Figure 1) (Mary-Rousselière 1976, Taylor 1971-1972). These finds consist of two nearly complete wooden drums and various other drum frame fragments that date to the centuries surrounding A.D. 1000 (Taylor 1971-1972). In the spring of 2014, the authors and Lori White re-examined all of the wood fragments recovered from Button Point, documenting the known drum pieces and discovering nearly a dozen previously unidentified drum fragments. These fragments represent instruments in a range of sizes, but with a consistent and uniquely Late Dorset Palaeoeskimo style that has not been identified prior to our research. In this paper, we discuss a proposed typology of the Dorset drums and drum fragments, and contrast their stylistic attributes with subsequent historic Inuit drum morphology in the region. We will also discuss some of the functional aspects of how the drums were manufactured and the use of foraged coastal resources in their construction. Finally, we offer an interpretation of the driftwood-constructed drums as part of what we believe to be elements of Late Dorset shamanism.
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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) | 0.002 | 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 it