Paleoecological Studies at the Ancient Maya Center of Yaxnohcah Using Analyses of Pollen, Environmental DNA, and Plant Macroremains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yaxnohcah was a major city of the ancient Maya world, especially during the Preclassic period (1000 BCE–200 CE). Data from excavations provide important insights into the interactions between the ancient inhabitants and its surrounding Neotropical forests, a topic that, as a whole, remains largely enigmatic. This study aspired to fill that void in understanding by using traditional paleoethnobotanical approaches and a powerful new technology, the analysis of environmental DNA. Our results enabled us to characterize the vegetation growing in association with the principal structures and the artificial reservoirs that provided the city’s water supply. Because the area is without access to permanent water sources, such as rivers or lakes, these reservoirs were key to the development and survival of the city. Our results indicate that although there were large areas cleared for agricultural purposes, a mosaic of mature upland and bajo forest remained throughout the Maya occupation. In addition, our studies reveal that there were incursions of pine savanna into the area that may have been a reflection of prevailing edaphic conditions, or alternatively, the result of frequent burning.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".