Waterscape and Floods Management of Greek Selinus: The Cottone River Valley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates water bodies in the Greek colony of Selinus, Western Sicily-Italy. It focuses especially on one of the two rivers of the city: the Cottone. The investigative strategy adopted in this study consists of an interdisciplinary approach based on the analysis of archaeological evidence, Earth Sciences data, and the study of historical cartography. Results indicate that the Cottone River was not a swampy and unhealthy intermittent stream as it was believed so far; it was instead a fully functional water body featuring an active floodplain. Most importantly, research presented in this article indicates several floods occurred in Selinus from the second or third quarter of the sixth century BC to the end of the fifth century BC. These floods, which occurred at the peak of Selinus’ cultural and economic life, were related to severe major events, rather than seasonal floods, as suggested by other scholars. The management of these floods and the waterscape was crucial to the city’s prosperity. This article also analyzes the relationship between the Cottone River and the fortification walls located at the Cottone River Valley. Results indicate that the fortification walls functioned not only as a defensive infrastructure, but also as a hydraulic engineering solution for flood retention. A better understanding of the environment in which Selinus was settled is now available, and knowledge on the importance of waterscapes and their management has been enhanced.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".