A preliminary report of the excavation at Spitzkloof D rockshelter, Namaqualand, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes the first excavations of Spitzkloof D rockshelter located in the semi-arid desert of northern Namaqualand, South Africa. The site is in a dry river valley 30 km south of the Orange River, which currently acts as a lifeline for pastoralists with mixed sheep and goat herds. A surface survey of the site revealed pottery, lithics, domesticate remains, ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments and jewellery, glass beads and iron fragments. The stratigraphy is complex reflecting multiple occupations with six layers consisting of large hearths, ash deposits, and multiple pits, some with potential votive (faunal) offerings in their base. Faunal analysis reveals a broad subsistence strategy consisting of low-intensity sheep-keeping combined with the hunting of wild species found on the landscape today. The presence of Equus zebra, a locally extinct water obligate species, suggests occupation during a climatic period that was more humid than today. Radiocarbon dates from the upper layers confirm a Little Ice Age occupation between AD 1667-1936, when the region was cooler and wetter, and a peak in radiocarbon dates indicates a population pulse in the region. Glass trade beads, iron implements, OES beads, as well as fish remains and a limpet shell, potentially indicate that the people occupying Spitzkloof D were part of an extensive trade/interaction network. Future analysis will include increasing sample sizes through continued excavation, detailed lithic analysis, and further radiocarbon dating.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.002 |
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".