Digging Deep: Place-Based Variation in Late Pre-Contact Mā‘ohi Agricultural Systems, Society Islands
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the social and ecological contexts of past agricultural systems in complex societies requires expansive and nuanced data sets that recognize the role of all players in the production system. Such data sets are not often available and thus, there is a tendency to generalize across polities and ecosystems and to homogenize place- and time-specific variation. Here, we bring together ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological data to explore Mā‘ohi commoner and elite involvement in the production systems of the Society Islands at the time of European contact (AD 1767). We focus our analysis on the archaeological records of five polities located in four different watersheds on the islands of Mo‘orea and Ra‘iātea. We divide the polities into those that are elite- vs. commoner-centric and those that are located in productive versus marginal agricultural landscapes. We find that elites have a greater presence and closer association with agricultural production in productive ecological settings than in the more marginal ones. Although the archaeological expression of the agricultural systems look superficially the same in all contexts, maintaining productivity in the marginal contexts would have required different knowledge and more effort on the part of the Mā‘ohi farmer than in the more productive settings. In contrast to previous summaries of Mā‘ohi agriculture that focus on elite control and seasonal shortages, we highlight the place-based knowledge of Mā‘ohi commoners that was foundational to the centuries-old production systems that provisioned both the elite and commoners alike.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it