At the Cutting Edge of Identity: Re-Examining the Craft Imagery of Tomb 29 from the Isola Sacra Necropolis, Ostia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since Guido Calza first published the results of his excavations at the Isola Sacra necropolis at Ostia, Tomb 29 has been identified as the tomb of a blacksmith, specifically a ferramentarius who made and sold small tools. Yet the imagery displayed on the tomb presents several key features that suggest this interpretation is inaccurate, despite its continued prevalence. These features, from the contents of the work scenes to the collections of tools that are portrayed alongside them, indicate that this tomb commemorates the identity of a professional sharpener, specifically one that sharpened the tools of other craftsmen working in Ostia and Portus. This reinterpretation reveals a profession that is otherwise absent from the iconography of Roman craftsmen while providing a number of interesting insights into the organization of labour and craft specialization in the Roman world.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".