Perspectives on a Post-White Sands Coast: Re-Evaluating Research into Early Peopling of the Northwest Coast of North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of new dates associated with the White Sands human footprints in New Mexico that suggest humans were in North America south of continental ice sheets during (or before) the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), I discuss the implications for the late Pleistocene archaeology of the Northwest Coast – the presumed “Pacific Coastal Route” for entry into the continent. I argue that we can and should employ state-of-the-art methods to push our paleoenvironmental reconstructions back through the LGM to enable a search for evidence of people entering North America via this route. However, I more strongly emphasize that documenting the earliest postglacial occupations of the Northwest Coast remains a significant endeavor, both from a disciplinary perspective, but also for the Indigenous descendent communities inhabiting the region. Rather than rendering our archaeological efforts on the Northwest Coast wasted, White Sands opens new and exciting research questions, with implications reaching throughout the Americas.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".