Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prehistory refers to the period before written documents. Evidence about the events of prehistory is obtained from archaeology, and from anthropological research on small-scale societies of the recent past. For the vast majority of human existence, people lived in small mobile foraging bands. In the trajectory that ultimately led to large-scale societies, six crucial transformations stand out: the transitions to sedentism, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. We suggest that economic theory can be used to explore the causal factors behind these transitions. We sketch the nature of the evidence available from archaeology and outline basic economic ideas for non-economists. Our general method in studying a particular type of transition is to review well-documented regional cases from archaeology, together with other relevant empirical generalizations, and then construct a formal economic model to account for this body of evidence. After deriving predictions from our model, we often discuss further regional cases that were not used in the construction of the original model. We will preview the conclusions reached in subsequent chapters, briefly survey the economic literature on prehistory, and compare our framework to the theoretical frameworks used by archaeologists and other scholars.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.006 |
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".