Ethnohistoric Accounts as Valuable Resources for Deciphering Commensal Relationships of Pre-Contact Caribbean Agouti (Dasyproctidae: <i>Dasyprocta</i> )
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Neotropical rodent agouti ( Dasyprocta sp.), arguably one of the most prominent pre-Contact introduced commensals of the Lesser Antilles, has long been proposed as having been managed and maintained in captivity by Indigenous Caribbean groups. These claims, however, remain so far unsubstantiated. Ethnohistoric texts may serve as valuable resources for establishing the commensal relationships agouti shared with Indigenous Caribbean groups. Here, I synthesize the evidence from seventeenth century French ethnohistoric texts to address the question of pre-Contact agouti management and captivity and concretize some of the many other commensal relationships linking agouti to Indigenous groups. Ethnohistoric texts reveal that, in addition to having been managed through garden hunting, agoutis occurred as tame, in close proximity to settlements, although they do not appear to have been maintained in captivity. Agoutis also occurred as detached from human settlements, maintaining minimal interaction with human groups. Ethnohistoric texts repeatedly associate agoutis and agouti skeletal elements with ritual practices, suggesting ceremonial/cosmological value. This study shows that ethnohistoric texts hold critical potential for substantiating pre-Contact commensal relationships and, by extension, may offer insight into Indigenous identities and lifeways, and island ecology.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".