A Witness of the Matrimonial Rituals from Old Novgorod. Inscription on a Bone from the 13th Century Excavated 2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the summer of 2020, a fragment of a cow's rib with a Cyrillic inscription was found at excavations in Novgorod. The place of the find is one of the richest boyar estates in the Lyudin quarter of medieval Novgorod. The time of the document hitting the ground is the last quarter of the 13th—the first twenty years of the 14th century. The inscription is fully preserved, it contains a whole readable message. The historical and cultural value of the find lies in the content of its compact inscription: it is unique evidence of a bride-price agreement. The terminology is of value: the bride, on whose behalf the text is written, and the groom (addressee) are designated not by their own names (Christian or pre-Christian), but by the images of the ritual folklore of the wedding — kuna ‘marten’ (she) and sobol’a ‘sable’ (he). The bride-price is no less interesting. The text communicates an idea of a dialogue between the two sides of the marriage ritual. The new evidence of the matrimonial rites and the associated oral-written communication expands our understanding of this sphere of medieval culture and allows us to correct some interpretations of the few birch bark letters on the topic of marriage.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".