Furnaces, hearths, rituals, and construction: investigating the utilisation of woody plant species at the Early Iron Age site of Ndondondwane by means of identifying archaeological charcoal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Ndondondwane, an Early Iron Age settlement situated on the banks of the Thukela River, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, provides a unique record of a single, short-term occupation (c. 1300 to 1200 years ago). Several areas associated with different activities had been previously excavated and analysed, yielding various scenarios for the cultural and social organisation of the settlement. Three phases of occupation or cultural horizons have been identified and this paper largely explores the charcoal assemblage from the middle cultural horizon, during the settlement’s maximum extent of occupation. Charcoal was analysed from the central part of the site, represented by a livestock byre (kraal), a meeting place, and a craft production area; as well as the peripheral areas including three domestic middens and a charcoal preparation area. Archaeological charcoal specimens were examined using reflective light microscopy to observe the characteristic anatomical features needed to determine the taxonomic group they represent and subsequently identified by direct comparison with a modern charcoal reference collection and published archaeological charcoal studies. Charcoal was identified as belonging to 15 families, 23 genera, and 29 species of trees with known fuel, construction, and medicinal uses. There was a preference for wood previously known as Acacia * , indicating that this genus was readily available and prolific in the surrounds of the site. Ndondondwane has been extensively investigated in terms of the archaeology, and this together with the anthracology data provides further insight into Early Iron Age settlement location-specific activities, cultural practices, and reasons for abandonment.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".