A Beothuk skeleton (not) in a glass case: rumours of bones and the remembrance of an exterminated people in Newfoundland – the emotive immateriality of human remains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter tells the story of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland, hunter-gatherers indigenous to this northern island. The Europeans, mostly English and Irish, came in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the coming of the settlers the Beothuk dwindled and finally, in 1829 they were declared extinct. The exact cause of this extinction is still debated, but there is no doubt that the ancestors of many of those still living in Newfoundland were the agents of extermination of a people, whether by disease or genocidal violence. Since their extermination Beothuk bones emerged from the earth and were sometimes taken away and stored and displayed in museums in Newfoundland, Edinburgh and elsewhere. These bones still exist, now withdrawn from display, but intermittently receiving the attention of oesteoarchaeologists and physical anthropologists, as well as a handful of activists petitioning for their return. This chapter addresses the capacity of bones to speak, to give testimony and, in giving testimony, to make “old acts indelible”. How do these bones trouble and haunt contemporary articulations of settler identity and our ethical engagement with the absent presence of those who have been violently dispossessed?
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".