Fifty Years of Collecting: The Sale of Ancient Maya Antiquities at Sotheby’s
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Pre-Columbian antiquities, particularly those from the Maya region, are highly sought after on the international art market. Large auction houses such as Sotheby’s have dedicated pre-Columbian departments and annual auctions, for which sales catalogues are created. These catalogues offer insight into market trends and allow the volume of antiquities being bought and sold to be monitored. The following study records the public sale of Maya antiquities at Sotheby’s over a period slightly exceeding 50 years from 1963 to 2016. More than 3,500 artifacts were offered for sale during this period, of which more than 80 percent did not have associated provenance information. The data suggests that the volume of Maya antiquities offered for sale at Sotheby’s public auctions have been steadily decreasing since the 1980s, but their relative value has increased. Quantitative studies of auction sales such as this one can be useful in monitoring the market for illegal antiquities and forgeries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it