Using bone technology and ZooMS to understand indigenous use of marine mammals at Iita, Northwest Greenland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The site of Iita in northwestern Greenland had near-continual occupation from 1000 CE to the mid-twentieth century, which presents an unparalleled opportunity to examine diachronic changes in the use of marine mammals for food and raw material resources by Pre-Inuit (Late Dorset) and Inuit–Inughuit—two culturally distinct Indigenous groups. Limited wood in High Arctic environments necessitated the use of antler, bone, and ivory for tool making. Choices in the selection and processing of osseous material reflect changes in the way these two groups used the same resources. However, modification of osseous material during the toolmaking process is often to such an extent that few diagnostic features remain for species identification. Here, we include Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to identify typically indeterminate pieces of manufacturing debris from preserved collagen. The minimally destructive extraction technique using polishing films had a 99% success rate. The results suggest that selection of raw materials from certain marine mammals, particularly narwhal, by toolmakers at Iita was more frequent than previously understood through traditional faunal analysis alone. There is a paucity of narwhal from the Pre-Inuit (Late Dorset) assemblage, which contrasts starkly with the high frequency of narwhal in the Inuit–Inughuit assemblage. We demonstrate the importance of combining the analysis of bone-tool manufacturing debris with traditional dietary faunal remains to improve our understanding of resource use in coastal environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".