Linear and appositional growth in children as indicators of social and economic change during the Medieval Islamic to Christian transition in Santarém, Portugal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study explores whether child growth has signalled periods of social change between the Medieval Islamic and post‐Islamic Christian Periods in Santarém, Portugal. The social change is associated with the Christian conquest of Iberia and the fall of the Islamic Empire in Europe, which ceased the regional influence of the Golden Age of Islam. This may have caused a deterioration in living conditions brought by the Christian conquest, compared with the social improvements brought by the Medieval Islamic Empire. Forty‐two juvenile skeletons were taken from three Medieval Islamic and three Late Medieval Christian sites excavated in the city of Santarém, Portugal. Age was estimated from tooth length. Linear growth for all long bones and appositional growth of the femur midshaft were compared with expected growth from the Denver Growth Study, using z scores. Significant growth deficit was found throughout the Medieval Islamic and Christian Periods in Santarém, as well as a deficit in apposition of cortical bone. Although children in the post‐Islamic Christian period showed a trend towards greater linear and appositional growth deficits, these differences were not statistically significant. Children in Medieval Islamic and Late Medieval Christian Periods show significant growth disruption, suggesting that in Santarém, the post‐Islamic Medieval Christian period may not have witnessed a decrease in living conditions after the fall of Islamic rule in the territory. Further studies that incorporate more samples from the Islamic and Post‐Islamic Periods as well as pre‐Islamic population samples are needed to explore the possibility that the Islamic Period was more favourable for child growth.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".