<i>The Byzantine–Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach</i> By Gideon Avni
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Arab conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries had a profound impact on the history of Eurasia. While debate will continue over the dates of specific battles and the capitulations of given towns and cities, there is broad agreement over the fundamental chronology leading to the establishment of a massive new empire stretching from the Atlantic coast to the border with Tang dynasty China. Scholars have long recognized the potential of archaeology to contribute to the questions surrounding the demographic, economic and cultural shifts that occurred during this crucial period. Attempts to exploit the material record have often stumbled, however, due to the widespread tendency to privilege textual claims over archaeological data, the existence of considerable lacunae in the record of excavations and field surveys, and the imprecise or erroneous dating of buildings and portable objects, particularly ceramics. There have been attempts in recent years to offer critical appreciations of archaeological discoveries. Most notable in the present context is Alan Walmsley’s short, but perceptive, Early Islamic Syria: An Archaeological Assessment (Duckworth, 2007). Gideon Avni’s new book takes a similar trajectory, but limits itself largely to the region of historical Palestine in the transition from Byzantine to Islamic rule. While the geographical range of this new study is smaller, the reader is more than compensated by the depth of the analysis. Avni takes advantage of the intensity of archaeological activity in Israel (ranging from long-term projects to rescue excavations and surveys) in order to examine the changes that occurred in urban and rural areas from the fourth to the eleventh centuries.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".