The Pre-Aksumite Period: indigenous origins and development in the Horn of Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Pre-Aksumite Period (mid-second to late first millennia BC) witnessed the rise of complex societies in the Horn of Africa. Archaeological survey and excavations in the Gulo Makeda region of Eastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) have produced new data and insights into this critical juncture in the cultural history of the region. Based on data from Mezber and other archaeological sites, we present a new Pre-Aksumite chronology and discuss the material culture, settlement, political organisation, economy, agricultural history and regional interactions of this period. We recommend the use of the term ‘Pre-Aksumite Period’ to encompass this time when the earliest polities developed in the region. Mezber provides us with a glimpse into the lifeways of indigenous peoples inhabiting the northern Horn of Africa who encountered South Arabian visitors to the region during the early first millennium BC. Data from Mezber shift our focus from external influences to considering the culture and development of autochthonous peoples of the Ethiopian/Eritrean highlands who had an active role in negotiating cultural contacts. This perspective constitutes a missing piece of the puzzle needed to better understand the broader socio-economic, political and cultural dynamics of the Pre-Aksumite Period.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".