Synthesis and analysis of the Early to Middle Holocene radiocarbon record for the Northern Northwest Coast of North America: A gap in dated components between ∼9000 and 8300 cal BP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Northwest Coast of North America has consistently been an epicenter of hunter-gatherer research, but attention has focused on the period after 5000 cal BP. Using data largely produced within the past 12 years, we present the first synthesis and analysis of this region’s 14C record between ∼11000 and 5000 cal BP. Our analysis produced two primary findings (i) that the number of dated sites does not increase or decrease significantly during this period and (ii) there is an unexplained gap in dated sites across the entire region between ∼9000 and 8300 cal BP. The existence of this gap has critical implications regarding hypotheses of technological change, migration, population continuity, and cultural evolution for the region. However, available explanations for this gap are problematic. Possible causes investigated include: demographic abandonment of the region, distorting effects of the calibration curve, sea-level change, taphonomy, and sampling error. All are found to be inadequate.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".