A Review of Malta’s Pre-Temple Neolithic Pottery Wares
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Sites from the earliest known phases of Maltese prehistory often consist of scatters of sherds for the Għar Dalam and Skorba phases (6000–4800 BCE), and tomb contexts for the Żebbuġ phase (3800–3600 BCE). Neolithic studies are, therefore, heavily reliant on the study of pottery. Although traditional typological and seriation-based analyses of the pottery record have substantially enhanced our knowledge of Early Neolithic Malta, there is a growing appreciation of the need to go beyond these approaches to gain new insights. This study reviews the accessible literature on fabric studies on assemblages found in the Maltese Islands, presenting the state of knowledge for the pottery of the Għar Dalam, Skorba (Early Neolithic), and Żebbuġ (Late Neolithic) phases. Microphotographs of pottery wares were selected from a compilation produced for an ongoing project (the MaltaPot project) to illustrate the descriptions found in the literature. The advances made by archaeologists in studying the Maltese Neolithic pottery are reviewed, and suggestions for building on them are proposed, as archaeometric and petrographic techniques have not been applied systematically to Neolithic pottery from Malta.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".