The Significance of Coffin Construction Practices in the Old and Middle Kingdoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over time, technology and traditions shift as artists or craftspeople adapt to transformations in fashion, politics, religion, the availability of materials, and advances in knowledge. These changes in production are often visible in the material record. Understanding why certain elements of production change or remain constant can therefore help archaeologists or historians to understand better the broader social contexts in which these communities of practice lived and worked. Developments in the production of ancient Egyptian coffins over time can provide an example of the type of social insights that a long-term, large-scale analysis of technological history permits. In this longue-durée analysis, the author highlights the construction history of coffins from the beginning of the Old Kingdom through to the end of the Middle Kingdom, punctuated with a selection of detailed case studies. The adaptations in practice show carpenters beginning a tradition, demonstrate the emergence of communities of practice, and express a major shift in approaches in response to revolutions in religious expression. Once this tradition emerges, however, it remains constant throughout the First Intermediate Period and beyond, during a time otherwise characterised by experimentation and political upheaval. This suggests a continuity and resiliency among communities of carpenters, building up an alternative history to the royal narrative.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".