A CENTENNIAL AMBIGUITY: THE CHALLENGE OF RESOLVING THE DATE OF THE JEAN-BAPTISTE LAINÉ (MANTLE), ONTARIO, SITE—AROUND AD 1500 OR AD 1600?—AND THE CASE FOR WOOD-CHARCOAL AS A <i>TERMINUS POST QUEM</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Considered in isolation, the radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates on short-lived plant remains from the Jean-Baptiste Lainé (formerly Mantle) site, Ontario, yield an ambiguous result: more or less similar probability around AD 1500 or alternatively around AD 1600. This village site, likely of no more than ca. 20–30 years total duration, illustrates the challenges of high-resolution dating across periods with a reversal/plateau in the 14 C calibration curve. Another problem we identify is the tendency for dating probability for short-duration sites to sometimes be overly compressed as dating intensity increases under analysis with OxCal, and for probability to shift away from the real age range especially during reversal/plateau episodes. To address both issues additional constraints are necessary. While a tree-ring sequenced 14 C “wiggle-match” is the best option where available, we investigate how, in the absence of such an option, use of the in-built age in wood-charcoal samples can be used to distinguish the likely correct date range. This approach can resolve ambiguities in dating, e.g., for shorter-duration Late Woodland village sites in northeastern North America, but also other short-duration cases corresponding with reversal/plateau episodes on the 14 C calibration curve. We place the Jean-Baptiste Lainé site most likely in a range between ca. AD 1595–1626 (95.4% probability).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it