EARLY FORMATIVE PERIOD BIRD USE AT PASO DE LA AMADA, MEXICO
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Avifaunal remains from archaeological sites have a largely unrecognized explanatory potential. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic records have shown that, especially in Mesoamerica, birds and their products have served a wide range of utilitarian, decorative, and symbolic purposes. Despite their ability to inform research on many aspects of prehistoric life, avifaunal remains from archaeological contexts remain under-studied. This paper demonstrates how a holistic approach to their analysis—one that explores several types of human-bird interaction—can move beyond studies of subsistence. A previously reported and newly updated avifaunal collection was reanalyzed to shed light on the relationship between the many uses of birds and the establishment of hereditary inequality at Paso de la Amada, an Early Formative period ceremonial center on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Results indicate that Early Formative people used birds as a source of food, feathers, and bone, and that the ritual use of birds was an important component of status display. Even at this early date, birds were symbolically valuable and played a role in ritual performance, suggesting that their later significance in Mesoamerican ritual, religion, and iconography has an antecedent beginning no later than 1700 BC.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".