Plant processing in the Late Mesolithic Poland: in search for function of the mysterious ‘curved knives’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies on the treatment and use of plants in the Mesolithic are difficult due to the small number of sources. However, they are important because it was one of the basic branches of the economy of the early Holocene community. This article presents the results of use-wear and experimental studies aimed at the interpretation of the function of the so-called curved knives. These tools are associated with the treatment of silica plants, but their actual function is not fully understood. The research was based on a collection of 66 products of this type from five sites in central Poland and is one of the first published research on tools of this kind from this part of Europe. As a result of microscopic analysis, eight types of curved knives were distinguished. In order to identify the plant species, the knives were used on an experimental programme based on the results of palynological studies carried out at site 6 in Ludowice, an economically specialised site. As a result of the traceological analyses, a number of correlations between artefacts and experimental tools have been identified that can provide an important step towards interpreting the actual function of the curved knives. At the same time, the large discrepancies in the traces resulting from the processing of different species of silica plants were documented and the probable use of many of their species in the European Mesolithic was suggested.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".