The Archaeology of Camas Production and Exchange on the Northwest Coast: With Evidence from a Sts'ailes (Chehalis) Village on the Harrison River, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Edible root resources were widely cultivated and consumed by First Peoples throughout North America from the early to mid-Holocene to historic times. In recent decades, archaeobotanists, ethnobotanists, archaeologists, and traditional knowledge-holders have explored and clarified many aspects of root food ecology, production, and exchange. This paper focuses on camas, considered a cultural keystone species across much of western North America because of its high cultural value and influence in defining the cultural identities and land use of resident communities. While historic camas use by First Peoples has been widely documented throughout the Pacific Northwest, the archaeology of camas is little known at coastal sites. This paper presents evidence for a concentration of camas bulbs (Camassia spp.) found in an earth oven complex within an ancient Sts'ailes (Chehalis) village in the Upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. We contextualize this find by exploring the abundant ethnobotanical and ethnohistoric camas literature in order to create a picture of the production and exchange of camas amongst coastal communities of the Northwest Coast. We analyze direct and indirect sources of archaeological data for coastal camas production, which helps us to evaluate questions raised by the presence of this resource 150 km outside of its historical growing range.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".