Interpreting medieval mobility from burials at the rock‐hewn church of St. Georges, Gurat (France): Insights from strontium isotope analysis of bones and teeth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The cave church St. Georges is a hand‐carved limestone cave church located in Gurat, southwestern France, which likely developed from a hermitic site by the High Middle Ages (1001–1300 AD). Gurat is unique in that few bioarchaeological studies of monastic collections, particularly in France, have been conducted. This research represents the first effort to understand who the people at Gurat were, and where they might have travelled from, by employing strontium isotope analysis. Such data are used to interpret motivations behind hypothesized mobility. Dental and skeletal tissues from 14 individuals excavated at the cave church site were analysed for their strontium isotope ratio via laser ablation multicollector inductively coupled plasma‐mass spectrometry. The 87Sr/86Sr values in human bone samples from Gurat indicate that all individuals likely lived near Gurat for at least the last few years of their lives. 87Sr/86Sr values yielded from tooth enamel samples indicate that during childhood, the Gurat individuals were mobile and originated from a region isotopically dissimilar to Gurat. Mobility into the site of Gurat may be explained by the pilgrimage routes in which traversed Gurat, as well as by the practice of transhumance. Given that two pilgrimage routes passed near the village, Gurat would have been a consistently well‐travelled site for nonlocal Christians during the Middle Ages. It is therefore likely that many travellers passed through the village of Gurat. Additionally, because Cistercian monks practiced transhumance during the medieval period, and many of the Gurat individuals do appear isotopically to have origins from highland regions in France (i.e., the Massif Central), it is possible that these individuals engaged in seasonal migration between highland and lowland regions. Therefore, the data presented here have demonstrated that, through strontium isotope analysis, the Gurat individuals were likely migrants to the Gurat cave church.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".