Reforesting Roman Africa: Woodland Resources, Worship, and Colonial Erasures
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite a range of literary and archaeological evidence for the importance of forests in Roman Africa, these marginal lands and their marginalised populations have been almost entirely ignored or downplayed by modern scholarship, leading to tortured interpretations of a range of material. This article asks two questions, one historical, the other historiographic: what role did the forests of Africa Proconsularis play in the economies and productive imaginaries of the region's inhabitants? And why have the products, labour and labourers of sylvan industries been largely written out of modern accounts? After drawing together evidence and proxies for the centrality of Africa's pine forests to a range of lifeways, cultural practices and economies — including their fundamental (and overlooked) role in providing the pitch that lined the exported amphorae that drove North Africa's economic boom — I argue that French colonial practices around forests led to their erasure from histories of Roman Africa.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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