Characterizing variation in late precontact diets using dental microwear texture analysis: a Caborn-Welborn example
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Caborn-Welborn phase identifies late precontact and early postcontact (ca. AD 1400–1700) peoples of the lower Ohio River valley in Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois who coalesced following the collapse of the Angel chiefdom. Our current understanding of Caborn-Welborn foodways is that they, like their contemporaries in other parts of eastern North America, subsisted largely on maize and wild game, supplemented by a wide range of other wild and cultivated foods. While technically accurate, this generic picture of late precontact diets does not do justice to the many microclimatological and cultural nuances that characterized local native southeastern and midwestern diets. Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) is a method to understand diet by analyzing the microscopic scratches and pits left on teeth during mastication. Combining DMTA with other lines of evidence, we confirm previous studies that indicate that at least some Caborn-Welborn peoples consumed less maize than their ancestors living at the Angel site. Rather than understanding Caborn-Welborn peoples as practicing a generic late precontact subsistence strategy, our study highlights how Caborn-Welborn peoples chose to eat less maize and consume more hard wild foods such as nuts compared with their contemporaries.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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 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".