Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fundamental issue obscuring our understanding of the place of animal husbandry in the societies and economies of the ancient Near East remains definitional. The continual conflation of the term "mobile pastoralism" with politically and socially independent pastoralism has reached a point where mobile pastoralism is claimed never to have existed. Sheep and goat recovered from settlements that show evidence for foddering, or grazing on cultivated crops, is argued as proof of a lack of mobility, but this fails to take into account whether these animals are used for meat and milk, sacri ce, or their wool. It also does not distinguish between those animals kept for daily use by individual households and institutionally owned animals. The textual evidence from Mari, which describes mobile pastoralism, is argued to be anomalous. But, in fact, Mari pastoralism is not independent pastoralism either. It is, however, mobile and long-distance, as well as variable according to the particular pastoralist group under discussion. This paper argues that a wide range of textual material, of which the Mari archive is but one source, shows that multiple kinds of pastoralism coexisted in the ancient Near East, including multiple kinds of mobile, or distance, pastoralism, as distinct from independent pastoralism.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.007 |
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".