Isotopic Insights into Livestock Production in Roman Italy: Diet, Seasonality, and Mobility on an Imperial Estate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agriculture is the most important intersection between farming communities and the natural world, with major implications for land exploitation and labour organisation. In Italy, at the heart of the Roman Empire, understanding of agriculture remains heavily dependent on ancient sources, which are unable to provide a regional or diachronic view of practices across the socio-economic spectrum. In order to gain insight into agricultural economies in Roman Italy and their social and environmental implications, this article reconstructs agro-pastoral strategies at an imperial estate in southern Italy through a multi-isotope investigation of livestock bone collagen and tooth enamel. Analysis of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium isotopes (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, 87Sr/86Sr) are combined to evaluate animal management and mobility at Vagnari vicus and the villa of San Felice in the Basentello Valley. Results reveal taxon-specific herding strategies with the potential for significant inputs from legume forage/fodder and/or natural environments. Caprine herding did not appear to include long-distance transhumance. This analysis moves past previous text-based generalisations to provide a new and nuanced perspective on animal production in rural southern Italy and its economic and environmental implications.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".