Strontium Isotope Analysis, the Neonatal Line, and Archaeological Caribou Herd Identity in Northwest Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rangifer tarandus is a keystone species in the Arctic and has shaped human land use in this region for tens of thousands of years. The migratory ecotype requires large landscapes and long migrations between summer and winter ranges to meet their nutritional needs. The extent to which these ranges have remained the same has been controversial and uncertain. Archaeological caribou herd identity is usually ascribed based on modern caribou herd distribution. However, no study has assessed the validity of the implicit assumption of multi-thousand years of range stasis. Given that a caribou herd’s distribution and landscape use may change in response to ecological or climatic changes, it is important to assess whether past and present calving ground locations may have shifted. In this study, we applied strontium isotope analysis to identify calving grounds of archaeological caribou from the pre-contact/historic Lake Kaiyak site (MIS-00032) near the calving grounds of the modern Western Arctic caribou herd (WAH). We found that the 87Sr/86Sr values of the molars were consistent with those predicted for WAH ranges. The dental enamel from the neonatal line (NNL), a pathological marker of birth, was consistent with the modern WAH calving grounds and early summer range. These results suggest that the archaeological specimens were WAH animals. Broadly, this supports the use of strontium isotope analysis of permanent molars with an emphasis on the NNL to determine the herd identity of ungulates in the archaeological record, which has important implications for archaeology and modern wild ungulate herd management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; 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".