CONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS AND INSULAR DISTRIBUTIONS: DEER BONE ARTIFACTS OF THE PRECOLUMBIAN WEST INDIES—A REVIEW AND SYNTHESIS WITH NEW RECORDS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The remains of non-native deer (Cervidae) have been sparsely recorded in Amerindian archaeological sites of the West Indies, but evidence indicates the presence of at least two genera, white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus ) and brocket deer ( Mazama ), during the precolumbian era known as the Ceramic Age (ca. 500 BC–AD 1500). Due to underreporting of finds and lack of regional integration of existing records, however, the West Indian distribution of cervid remains and their cultural importance are not well understood. Here, I synthesize records for unmodified and modified deer bone from 29 archaeological sites on seven islands in the precolumbian island Caribbean with descriptions for four new records of deer bone artifacts from Carriacou and Grenada. I discuss taxonomic attribution issues, evidence for manufacturing techniques, and the utilitarian and symbolic significance of deer bone artifacts. Particular attention is given to proportions of worked and unworked bone, element diversity, and skeletal part representation as a means to distinguish the introduction of living deer from the introduction of carcass products. The evidence presented here is consistent with island Amerindians importing cervid bone as finished artifacts or raw material for tool and ornament manufacture rather than live animals. This study enhances our understanding of the ways in which Amerindians were engaged in exchange networks based on the movement of exotic goods between the West Indies and continent. More broadly, it contributes to conceptual methods for distinguishing the transfer of body parts from the translocation of live animals in studies of exotic animal dispersal by humans.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".