Long-Term Urban and Population Trends in the Southern Mesopotamian Floodplains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The processes of long-term urbanization in southern Mesopotamia are still insufficiently investigated, even though recent studies using large datasets and focusing on neighboring regions have paved the way to understanding the critical role of multiple variables in the shaping of settlement strategies by ancient human societies, among which climate change played an important role. In this paper, we tackle these issues by analyzing, within the new FloodPlains Web GIS project, a conspicuous amount of archaeological evidence collected over the past decades at approximately 5000 sites in southern Mesopotamia. We have measured modifications over time in a variety of demographic proxies generated through probabilistic approaches: our results show that the rapid climate changes, especially those that occurred around 5.2, 4.2, and 3.2 ka BP, may have contributed—in addition to other socioeconomic factors—to triggering the main urban and demographic cycles in southern Mesopotamia and that each cycle is characterized by specific settlement strategies in terms of the distribution and the dimension of the urban centers.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".