Archaeological Investigations at the Ikirahak Site Raise Questions Concerning Taltheilei Land Use in Southern Nunavut
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report a new Taltheilei site-type found off the west coast of Hudson Bay in southern Nunavut. The Taltheilei is an archaeological culture that existed in the Barrenlands of the central Canadian Subarctic between 2600 and 300 years ago. Their land use strategies were tethered to the seasonal migrations of the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq caribou herds throughout tundra and forest landscapes. Tundra-based sites are typically interpreted as short-lived summer camps, but our discovery of three unique pit-house sites on the shores of Maguse Lake raises new questions concerning diversity in Taltheilei tundra land use. Architectural, faunal, lithic, and geoarchaeological data recovered from the Ikirahak site (JjKs-7) support the hypothesis that Taltheilei groups were extending their tundra stays into the fall. We report the evidence from four excavated pit-house features. Terraced platforms along the internal perimeters of these houses suggest they were designed for cold season use. The faunal assemblage is dominated by caribou remains. Higher relative frequencies of appendicular elements suggest a focus on secondary butchering. A large fraction of the faunal assemblage is highly fragmented and calcined, which is consistent with heavy processing and the use of bone as an alternative fuel source. Higher frequencies of lithic debris around dwelling floor perimeters are suggestive of maintenance activities. Multi-element concentrations in dwelling and site-wide sediments also show that hearth refuse was dumped outside. These findings seem to reflect longer tundra occupations during fall, a land use strategy that was likely guided by Qamanirjuaq herd behaviour specific to the Maguse Lake area, fall hunting and processing goals, and ecologically couched mobility logistics. As just four pit-houses from one Taltheilei camp have been investigated to date, our understanding of these places within Taltheilei worlds and northern socio-ecologies is currently limited. Further research at Ikirahak, the other Maguse Lake pit-house sites, and at other caribou water crossings on the tundra of the Qamanirjuaq caribou range is needed to support or refute our hypotheses.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.006 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".