Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper chronicles how Indigenous-made stone “vasiform” smoking pipes from Ontario foster fresh perspectives on archaeological and anthropological approaches to representation and meaning. These discussions often undervalue the material world, whereas recent emphases on “things themselves” tend to neglect issues of representation, meaning, and symbolism. Variations in smoking pipe form, including several examples of pipes that resemble fish, point to the importance of more-than-representational approaches. Considering how and why a few pipes “grew fins” while the majority remained “bedded down” speaks to the importance of beginning discussions of representation and meaning from postanthropocentric vantages that recognize the vibrancy of matter. The pipes offer an opportunity to revisit the long-standing tension between matter and meaning, providing new angles of articulation with two complementary lines of thought—assemblage theory and Peircean semiotics. Both theories align with “nonrepresentational” critiques, postanthropocentrism, and relational ontologies, but archaeologists rarely consider the two together. The emergent relationship between vasiform pipes, assemblage theory, and Peircean semiotics documented in this article offers useful ways to continue challenging the deep-seated matter-meaning dualism in archaeological thought.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".