Blowpipes and their metalworking applications: New evidence from Mayapán, Yucatán, Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study presents evidence of two tuyères, or blowpipe tips, used in metalworking at the Postclassic period city of Mayapán. Blowpipe technology has long been hypothesized to be the production technique for introducing oxygen to furnaces during the metal casting process on the basis of ethnohistorical depictions of the process in ancient Mesoamerica. To our knowledge, the tuyères recovered at Mayapán are the first archaeologically documented tuyères for pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. The dimensions, internal perforation, vitrification, and presence of copper prills within the ceramic fabric, suggest that they were used in pyrotechnological production, likely metalworking, and is consistent with previous evidence for small-scale metalworking at Mayapán. Blowpipe use in metallurgical production is a logical extension of a much longer tradition of blowgun use in hunting, which was likely already present in Mesoamerica by the time metal was introduced to West Mexico from South America. Furthermore, the dimensions of the Mayapán tuyères are consistent with the internal diameter of ethnohistorically-documented blowguns from Jacaltenango in the southwest Maya region. We conducted replication experiments that suggest that when combined with wooden blowpipes, the Mayapán tuyères would have been ideal for small-scale, furnace-based metallurgy, of the type identified at Mayapán from Postclassic period contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".