RECREATION OR DECORATION: WHAT WERE THE GLASS COUNTERS FROM POMPEII USED FOR?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the small glass objects often called counters, which are common finds at Pompeii, and normally thought to have been used in playing games. An assemblage of over 500 stratigraphically dated examples from Insula VI.1 are examined, and the colour and size of this group are compared to a dataset of first-century ad glass counters found in graves where they can be shown with certainty to be part of gaming sets. The comparisons show that the bulk of the Pompeii counters are very unlikely to have been used in gaming, a conclusion that is supported by the types of counters that would have been necessary to play games such as ludus latrunculorum and ludus duodecim scriptorum . Other functions are considered and it is suggested that many of the Pompeiian counters might have been used for interior decoration. The rise of a specialist production of counters that could have been used in gaming is demonstrated, and it is suggested this might have implications for the development of craft specialization and demonstrate the rise of leisure time in the first century ad .
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".