What Are Bucrania Doing in Tombs? Art and Agency in Neolithic Sardinia and Traditional South-East Asia
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The interior of Neolithic tombs in Europe is frequently decorated with carved and painted motifs. In Sardinia (Italy), 116 rock-cut tombs have their walls covered with bucrania (schematic depictions of cattle head and horns), which have long been interpreted as representations of a bull-like divinity. This article reviews similar examples of bucranium ‘art’ in the tombs of three traditional societies in South-East Asia, focusing on the agency of the motifs and their roles within social relationships between the living, the dead, and the spiritual world. From these ethnographic examples and the archaeological evidence in Sardinia, it is suggested that bucrania in Neolithic tombs were a specialized form of material culture that had multiple, cumulative effects and functions associated with social display, memory, reproduction, death, and protection.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it