The marbles of the basilica of Ascalon: another example of the Severan building projects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents the research conducted on the origin of the white marble architecture of the basilica of Ascalon (Israel). The basilica is located in the civic centre of the Roman city of Ascalon and it is one of the relatively few known monumental buildings of Roman Palestine. The various construction phases of the basilica are dated from the first century BC to the third century AD. As Israel has no sources of marble, this paper explores the origin of the white marble that was used for several architectural elements such as bases, columns, capitals, and figurative pilasters to identify their provenance. The methodology includes petrographic studies, chemical and isotopic analyses, and chemical analyses of inclusion fluids and extractable salts (crush-leach analyses) of the marble. The results demonstrate that the imported marble highlights the wide extent of connectivity and interregional trade in the region. Some of the main sources of building materials used in the construction programme of this basilica originate from famous supra-regional quarries such as Prokonnesos and Thasos, and different quarries on the island of Lesbos. The similarities between the Severan basilica in Ascalon and the contemporary building in Leptis Magna are also discussed in this paper. In combination with the absence of a built-up port in the ancient city of Ascalon, these results also provide important information on the economy of Roman Palestine, transportation networks, and the logistical organisation of large-scale building programmes.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".