Covering Bones: The Archaeology of Respect on the Kazan River, Nunavut
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Complex relationships between people and animals define life in the northern past. For Inuit these relationships are manifested in many ways, particularly in practices that are often described as showing respect for animals, thus promoting stable relations between animal and human societies. Frustratingly, many of these activities, which are so prominent in the ethnographic record, have few archaeological correlates. Here, we examine one important practice with a relatively high level of archaeological visibility: the concealment of caribou bones under stones and in other inaccessible areas, which thereby protect them from dogs and other disturbances that could offend the caribou’sinua(spirit, soul). We examine this phenomenon at several important caribou crossings and elsewhere at inland Inuit archaeological sites on the Kazan River, southern Nunavut, where we have conducted extensive surveys. This research was performed in collaboration with Baker Lake community members who have direct knowledge of these localities, including aspects of bone disposal. Together, these studies reveal a cultural landscape in which the human–caribou relationship is omnipresent, not just in terms of features relating to hunting and storage, but also with regard to the spiritual connection between these two interdependent categories of being.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".