Investigating individual migration life histories: An isotopic case study from 17th to 18th century Nouvelle France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives This isotopic study explores the mobility patterns of a growing urban population from Notre Dame's Catholic cemetery (1691–1796), located in Montreal (Canada). The site offers a unique opportunity to investigate early colonial settlement in Nouvelle France through individual life patterns. Materials and methods Stable oxygen isotopic compositions ( δ 18 O) were measured on the enamel of 32 individuals from the Notre Dame collection. Premolars and third molars were selected, as they reflected the δ 18 O of the drinking water during childhood (2.5–5.5 years) and pre‐adulthood (9.5–15.5 years). Firstly, premolars from three children (4–8 years of age) allowed us to provide a mean δ 18 O for the water consumed locally (22.7 ± 1.0 ‰ vs. VSMOW). Then, our δ 18 O were compared with published data from various geographical regions in North America (Eastern Canada and the United States) and Europe (France and the British Isles) to highlight mobility patterns of each individual. Results Forty‐eight percent of our sample (14 out of 29 individuals) did not reflect any long‐distance mobility, as all their δ 18 O reflected Montreal's variation during their lifetime. The remaining (15 out of 29 individuals) experienced mobility within ( n = 8) and outside ( n = 7) North America and at different phases of their life (five at pre‐adulthood, six at adulthood and four during both phases). Their migration patterns were analyzed according to age, sex, diet and possible ancestry in order to propose some “biographies.” Discussion This study highlights high population diversity in early colonial Montreal. Historians wrote that the city was growing, not only with the arrival of Europeans (e.g., young male workers, sailors), but also other groups (e.g., Indigenous people, slaves from North America). Additional analyses (e.g., ancient DNA) will be needed to explore further this phenomenon.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".