After the first stone: the Tasmanian correspondence of EB Tylor and Henry Ling Roth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the colonial correspondence that informed responsible for extending and formalizing the ideas of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ low cultural status and their extinction in the 1890s: Edward Burnett Tylor, the first Reader of that discipline in Oxford, and Henry Ling Roth, Halifax businessman and self-published anthropologist deemed them a separate race and declared it extinct. The two ideas became intricately connected, and deeply influential to nineteenth-century European understanding of human history, to an emergent and independent Australian colonial scholarship, and the ways that Australian history writing and national identity have continued to be shaped. But they were guided and inspired not just by abstracted facts and artefacts, but by local experience, expertise, and opinion on the Tasmanian Aborigines developed independently among a growing colonial scholarship. A goal of this archival exploration is not only to explore the importance of this influence, but to also disambiguate, or at least distinguish by attribution, the entangled and often symbiotic ideas of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ low evolutionary status from that of their supposed extinction. In its epilogue, this paper explores a further colonial scholarly interest in Tasmania that also emerged independently of the metropole. From the late 1880s, Australian archaeologists became intensely interested in the origins of the supposedly unique and isolated Tasmanian race. While fused in their expediency, when returned to an individual, archival level, the two anthropological ideas of ‘low’ and ‘extinct’ emerge as separate research projects. The antipodean aspiration to reveal in Tasmania a deep Aboriginal past offered an image in reverse of Tylor’s objective to illuminate a European antiquity. As such it rejected the ahistorical premise of an evolutionary comparative schema and help to found an important new direction in Australian archaeology.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".