Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cape York Peninsula in the far north east of Australia is the closest mainland point to Papua New Guinea and could well prove to be the site of initial colonisation of the continent >60,000 years ago. This tropical landscape of endemic flora and fauna has been isolated from Australia’s urban and industrial activity for the past 200 years, remaining remote and to a large degree unpopulated. The lack of recent development has resulted in very few archaeological investigations in the region, leaving gaps in our understanding of Cape York prehistory. This thesis provides new narratives on prehistory in the region through bioarchaeological and biogeochemical studies of Aboriginal human remains. These investigations have been framed and directed by Indigenous communities throughout Cape York and represent a form of community bioarchaeology. Biogeochemistry has been used globally in archaeology for over 40 years, however in Australia these techniques remain underutilised. Being a destructive, complicated and expensive set of analyses, with the added complexity of piecing together a meaningful narrative from small datasets, has resulted in few Australian archaeological isotope studies. The research presented here is one of the most extensive archaeological isotope projects conducted in the region to-date. In partnership with Aboriginal communities from Cape York we examined prehistoric/historic burials and mortuary cave internments from savannah and continental island settings. Landscape strontium isotope ratio (87Sr/86Sr) baseline data were also gathered for comparison with human results to investigate mobility and community structure. This thesis is presented as five scientific studies that have been prepared as chapters in a publication format for submission to international peer reviewed journals. I have conducted the fieldwork, historical research, scientific analyses and writing of all of these documents with editing, field/technical assistance and funding attributed to my supervisory team and co-authors. Preliminary chapters detail the excavation and analyses of human remains from the Flinders Islands and Gulf Plains of Cape York, discussing them within archaeological and historical contexts. The following study measures 87Sr/86Sr in surface soils, vegetation, waterways and mammalian fauna to test the reliability of predicting human provenance in Cape York, taking geological, seasonal and weathering processes into account. Regional portions of this baseline data are then analysed in detail in two case studies comparing human tooth enamel and dentine 87Sr/86Sr, carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotope signatures to interpret prehistoric and colonial period mobility and provenance. This thesis forms part of an overarching ARC project: (ARC Linkage: LP140100387) to test scientific techniques for provenancing Aboriginal ancestral remains. The studies presented here demonstrates the research value of isotope geochemistry in Australian bioarchaeology and provides a foundation for future repatriation of unprovenanced Aboriginal remains.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".