Hunted and Honoured: Animal Representations in Precontact Masks from the Nunalleq Site, Southwest Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precontact lifeways of Yup’ik people in Southwest Alaska were poorly known until the 2009–2018 excavations at the Nunalleq site near the village of Quinhagak. Until recently, the site dating from around AD 1400–1675 had been locked in permafrost that secured the extraordinary preservation of organic artefacts and faunal materials. As in many other hunter-gatherer communities across the North, animals were economically and culturally central to the lives of Nunalleq residents. This multidisciplinary paper combines the ethnographic study of unearthed artefacts with the results of subsistence and dietary studies at Nunalleq, and demonstrates how precontact Yup’ik ecologies were embodied in material culture, particularly in the iconography of ceremonial objects such as masks and mask attachments. Early ethnographic records and collections suggest that Yup’ik masks were often complex in structure and imagery, and can be considered miniature models of a multilayered and ensouled universe. Masks and other material culture representations highlight the way humans and animals are related and ontologically linked in Yup’ik worldviews. By taking this approach, this study aims to better understand the role of animals in the belief systems and lifeways of a precontact Nunalleq community.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".