How are archaeologists uncovering the secrets of an Ancestral Maya boomtown?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Famous for their large stone pyramids, and with advanced skills in construction, agriculture and mathematics, the Ancestral Mayas were once a powerful civilisation that lived across much of modern-day Mexico and Central America.Dr Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown, an archaeologist at Athabasca University in Canada, leads the Stann Creek Regional Archaeology Project to investigate the ancient town of Alabama in Belize.Along with Matthew Longstaffe, from the University of Calgary, and a team of local Mayas, they are shedding light on how and why Alabama developed and what life was like for the people who lived there.How are archaeologists uncovering the secrets of an Ancestral Maya boomtown?Archaeology Ancestral Mayas -a civilisation that occupied modernday Mexico and Central America from approximately 2000 BCE to 1600 CE Artefact -an object made or used by humans (e.g., pottery, stone tools) uncovered during an excavation Boomtown -a settlement characterised by sudden and rapid population growth and development Excavation -a technique used in archaeology to uncover a site by slowly and carefully removing soil and sediment to expose ancient structures and artefacts Geochemistry -chemical analysis of geological material, such as soil and sediment Mayas -Indigenous Peoples of Mexico and Central America who are descended from the Ancestral Mayas Wattle-and-daub -a construction technique in which woven sticks (wattle) are filled with soil (daub)
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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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".