An Experimental Examination of Central Canadian Arctic Hunter-Gatherer Pottery and Soapstone Containers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our initial foray into the study of ceramic production in northern North America was stimulated by our profound respect at the ability of western Alaskan women to produce even “ugly” pottery under environmental conditions that can only be characterized as a potter’s nightmare. Here we turn our attention to ceramic containers found even further north, in the Central Canadian Arctic. Here, environmental constraints (fuel shortages and poor weather conditions) on ceramic production are similar to western Alaska, but even more extreme. In addition to facing problems in making the pottery, the people of the Central Canadian Arctic faced unique problems associated with their maintenance and use. Unlike the western coast, in this area an alternative cooking technology was present in the form of soapstone containers. We present the results of experiments undertaken to explore how these two materials compare in terms of engineering principles and performance characteristics. We then consider the broader social setting in which the technologies were employed, to examine how social and technological factors interacted to shape material culture.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".