OBSIDIAN CONSUMPTION IN THE LATE PLEISTOCENE – EARLY HOLOCENE AEGEAN: CONTEXTUALISING NEW DATA FROM MESOLITHIC CRETE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper details the characterisation of four obsidian artefacts from the Mesolithic site of Livari Skiadi, one of only a handful of such pre-Neolithic sites on Crete. Elemental analysis using EDXRF sources the raw materials to Sta Nychia on Melos; in concert with other data, it can be suggested that this was the preferred Melian source for Late Pleistocene – Early Holocene populations. The Livari material represents the earliest Melian obsidian on Crete and by implication the first evidence of its inhabitants' connections to the Cycladic islands. When located within a broader review of Melian obsidian use in the Upper Palaeolithic – Mesolithic Aegean, it can be shown that the main consumers of these raw materials were island-based groups with immediate access to waterways that led to the Cyclades. It is suggested that distinctions between island and mainland toolkits (technical and raw material choices) may have been the product of seasonal, and environmental influences, rather than reflecting the products of different populations. Finally, certain datasets, including Livari, suggest the procurement of obsidian via intermediaries. These exchanges are viewed in avowedly social terms, with gift-giving a fundamental manner through which inter-group relations were created and maintained, whereby the circulation of obsidian can be viewed as one of those mechanisms through which Mesolithic Aegean cultural traditions came to be produced and reproduced.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".