Household Rituals and Merchant Caravanners: The Phenomenon of Early Bronze Age Donkey Burials from Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most studies of ritual and symbolism in early complex societies of the Near East have focused on elite and/or public behavioural domains. However, the vast bulk of the population would not have been able to fully participate in such public displays. This paper explores the zooarchaeological and associated archaeological evidence for household rituals in lower-stratum residences in the Early Bronze Age (EB) of the southern Levant. Data from the EB III (c. 2850-2550 BCE) deposits excavated at the site of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel, are illustrative of the difficulty in identifying the nature of household rituals. An integrated analytical approach to the architecture, figurines, foundation deposits, and domestic donkey burials found in lower-stratum domestic residences provides insights into the nature of household rituals. This integrated contextual perspective allows the sacred and symbolic role(s) of each to be understood and their importance for EB urban society to be evaluated.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".