Enigmatic Bones: A Few Archaeological, Bioanthropological, and Historical Considerations Regarding an Atypical Deposit of Skeletonized Human Remains Unearthed in Khirbat al-Dusaq (Southern Jordan)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article presents the results of the archaeological, bioanthropological, and historical analysis of an atypical human bone deposit found at the medieval Islamic desert site of Khirbat al-Dusaq in southern present-day Jordan. This site has yielded several human remains deposits, most of which appear to be either ordinary or reorganised burials with a clearly identifiable sepulchral function. However, one particular deposit (labelled “Structure no 1 (Pièce 5)”) displays several atypical features which complicate its interpretation. As such, radiocarbon dating of this particular deposit indicates a chronological range extending from the second half of the seventeenth century CE to the end of the eighteenth century CE. In addition, the human bones contained within this deposit tend to show unusual osteological characteristics, such as possible cut marks resembling peri-mortem lesions inflicted upon the deceased by third parties armed with sharp objects. The precise historical contextualisation of this deposit enables us to discuss different scenarios that could explain the circumstances of its inception. In this sense, the spectrum of possible explanatory interpretations ranges from the conjecture that the remains under study represent one or several victims of an inter-tribal conflict, a brigandage or retaliation attack, a crushed popular uprising, or even individuals who died during one of the violent raids perpetrated by local Bedouin tribes against the Mecca pilgrimage caravans during the Ottoman period.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".