Non-Human Whalers in Nuu-chah-nulth Art and Ritual: Reappraising Orca in Archaeological Context
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whaling was a central aspect of Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht and Makah culture on the northwest coast of North America. Not only was it economically important, it was vital to chiefly prestige. Art and ceremonial life were dominated by themes related to whaling. Thunderbird, the great supernatural whaler, was the source of hereditary prerogatives held by chiefs, including names, dances, regalia and rights to display images of thunderbird and whale. This paper argues that human observations of predatory behaviour by orcas (or killer whales) led to these animals also being perceived as non-human whalers from which chiefly prerogatives could be obtained. Wolves, the main figures in Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial life, had the power to transform into orcas, explaining their frequent presence in the art with thunderbirds and whales. This paper presents archaeological evidence for orca in the context of whaling and offers interpretations based on the extensive ethnographic and oral historical records. It also places perceptions of animals, the role of the hunter's wife and beliefs about orca in a broader context involving hunting societies in northwestern North America.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it