Puppy Sacrifice and Cynophagy from Early Philistine Tel Miqne-Ekron Contextualized
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The discovery of a sacrificed puppy at Tel Miqne-Ekron, a major Philistine settlement in Israel's southern coastal plain, highlights the role of dogs in Iron I Philistia. Though dog sacrifice is described in Hittite religious texts and attested in lands bordering the Aegean during the second–first millennia BCE, evidence for this practice, or even of dog bones, is largely absent from Late Bronze and non-Philistine Iron I (ca. 1550–1000 BCE) Levantine contexts. What distinguishes the Tel Miqne-Ekron puppy interment from later Persian- and Hellenistic-period dog burials, is the placement of its severed head between its hind legs. Microscopic analyses of cut marks on several vertebrae indicate that the iron knife found nearby was likely used in its decapitation. This article examines the Tel Miqne-Ekron puppy burial within its eastern Mediterranean milieu and explores the ritual role of dogs and cynophagy (dog-eating) in second–first millennia society.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".