The Implements of the Blade House: The Function and Symbolic Significance of Laurel-leaf Bifaces from Caves in Central Belize
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ancient Maya produced chipped chert and obsidian tools for inclusion in religious rituals as both symbolic and/or functional implements. In this paper, we discuss one particular form of these special chipped stone tools – the large laurel-leaf biface. Laurel-leaf bifaces recovered from the cave sites of Actun Chapat, Actun Tunichil Mucnal, Actun Yaxteel Ahau, and Je’reftheel in central Belize are analyzed in terms of context, lithic raw material, production techniques, symbolism, and use-wear in order to better understand their role(s) as ceremonially significant items. When combined with ethnohistoric and ethnographic information, these analyses allow us to see laurel-leaf bifaces as both functional implements for and powerful symbols of sacrifice within ancient Maya ideology and worldview.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".