Dating and Digging Stratified Archaeology in Circumpolar North America: A View from Nunalleq, Southwestern Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through the case study of the Thule-era village site of Nunalleq (GDN-248), this paper presents 14C dating results and perspectives on the issues associated with radiocarbon dating stratified archaeological sites in circumpolar North America. The objective was to investigate relative variation in the 14C age of ecofacts with the aim of establishing a hierarchy of dating suitability for Nunalleq that could more widely inform 14C sample selection on archaeological sites across the North American sub-Arctic and Arctic and Greenland. Owing to the complexities associated with interpreting and establishing the relative chronology of the deeply stratified sod deposits at Nunalleq, we adopted open-area excavation and single-context recording methods. This approach, we suggest, allowed us to eliminate stratigraphic complexity as a source of variation in 14C measurements and to assess the taphonomic issues associated with dating different ecofacts. In total, 16 samples were submitted for dating, comprising two sets of eight different ecofacts, one from each of two stratigraphically contemporary but spatially discrete contexts. In most instances, the 14C ages of ecofacts were statistically indistinguishable between the two contexts and support the relative chronological relationships established by excavation. Only Elymus arenarius (grass) manufactures and Heleomyzidae (fly) puparia produced different ages in the two contexts, variations that suggest that these items are unreliable dating materials. As noted in previous studies, Phoca sp. (seal) and Oncorhynchus sp. (salmon) bone collagen demonstrated a strong marine reservoir effect (c. 700 14C yr.). Picea sp. (wood chips) were marginally older than seeds from edible berries (Rubus chamaemorus and Empetrum nigrum) and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) bone collagen, which provided the most consistent ages.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".