“Shelter My Soul with Your Body” – A Burial Custom Influenced by Shamanism: A Case of Covering a Dead Face with the Right Ribs of a Local Sheep in Inner Mongolia, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Death represents the termination of all biological functions that sustain an organism and is inevitable in the ordinary life of people. Throughout history, death has been a topic of discussion. The emotion of fear of death has existed since the birth of human beings and has become even more so after civilization. To alleviate the fear of death, the unknown thing, primitive people began to explain death with their own world outlook; thus, the primitive concept of soul and religion came into being. Death is accompanied by the soul, and the fear of death gradually evolved into the awe of the soul, which gradually turned to practical action under the catalysis of primitive religion. Humans began to express their feelings (veneration or contempt) for the deceased in various practical behaviours and rituals that evolved into many fixed forms of burial or sacrificial customs after death. Shamanism is one of them. It is popular among nomadic groups in northern Eurasia, where many archaeological studies of shamanism have been conducted. This paper examined the phenomenon of covering a dead face with all the right ribs of a sheep at Nairentaoligai (乃仁陶力盖)Cemetery M17 in Inner Mongolia, China. These ribs were carefully researched by zooarchaeological methods, and we defined the basic information about the sheep. Then, we recovered the dismemberment process of the sheep by observing the traces on the bone surface and found that the dead face was covered by all the right ribs of a sheep in this tomb. This may have been to practice a particular idea. In connection with the shamanism culture prevalent in the area, we consider that this act may have been intended to declare the death of the body and shelter the soul of the dead from intrusion. This reflects shamanism culture on burial customs. This discovery is of great significance for the research of religious beliefs and death views of the northern nomadic people of the Mongolian Plateau region.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".