Biography of the Bull-Leaper: A ‘Minoan’ Ivory Figurine and Collecting Antiquity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tracing the manufacture and use of artefacts illuminates aspects of the society by which, and for which, they are made. The account of the different stages of this process, and the identities which the objects assume, has sometimes been called the ‘object biography’. This type of narrative has been used to consider antiquities and what they can reveal about the ancient world, but it often stops short of exploring how antiquities are understood in the modern world. This chapter explores the collection history and life while in the museum of a chryselephantine figurine, bought as a genuine Minoan antiquity by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, in 1931. The authenticity of the artefact has since been questioned, because of its unique appearance and lack of recorded excavation context, leading to the figurine being regarded by many as a fake manufactured in the early 20th century. However, the unresolved status of the artefact makes it ideal for exploring issues such as the practice of collecting and authenticating antiquities, and the creation of a demand for fake Minoan objects as a result of the excavations conducted by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos at the beginning of the 20th century.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".