Dietary habits in <scp>N</scp>ew <scp>F</scp>rance during the 17th and 18th centuries: An isotopic perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective Little attention has been given, so far, to the early colonial diet in New France from an isotopic perspective. Historical records that compare France to New France suggest a shift toward a more diverse diet, including a higher protein intake due to an improvement in living conditions in the New World, despite the retention of ancestral dietary habits. This hypothesis will be explored here. Materials and methods Stable carbon (organic and mineral) and nitrogen isotopes were measured on 43 individuals from Notre Dame cemetery (first Catholic parish church cemetery in Montreal, 1683–1803) as well as 13 French compatriots from La Rochelle, France (Protestant Hospital Cemetery, 1765–1792). Intragroup variation (age at death, sex, and/or burial location) was investigated and compared to compiled data from various northeastern North American sites (N = 99). Results The Notre Dame sample means are as follows: −19.6‰ versus VPDB for δ13Ccollagen, −12.22‰ versus VPDB for δ13Ccarbonate, and 11.5‰ versus AIR for δ15N. They are significantly lower than both La Rochelle (−18.4‰, −11.67‰, and 12.7‰, respectively, p ≤ .005) and the northeastern North American groups used for this comparison (p = .000). Discussion The isotopic values obtained from Notre Dame cemetery suggest that the diet was mainly based on C3 resources with limited C4 resources. Although different from all comparable contemporary sites, colonial Montreal's diet remains most similar to La Rochelle, France. This study agrees with historians who have suggested that French dietary traditions seem to have been retained among the early colonial inhabitants of Montreal.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".