Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s (CBC) long-running documentary series, The Nature of Things , featured a controversial episode titled The Ice Bridge . This documentary forwarded and dramatically re-enacted a hypothesis known as the Solutrean Hypothesis, that asserts the Americas were peopled first by sailors from Europe. This hypothesis, having been thoroughly debunked, is one that gets re-considered with regularity among European and Euro-settlers in what is currently the United States and Canada. This fringe archaeology speaks directly to the settler colonial logic of elimination, which seeks to exterminate all traces of Indigenous people, to ‘indigenize’ the settler population. It is not alone in this but exists within a spectrum of ‘archaeologies’ from conspiratorial and paranormal pseudoarchaeologies, to fringe hypotheses, and accepted (in the past or currently) scientific approaches that continue the violence of settler colonialism. Each of these has a very real impact on the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. Attachment to these understandings of the world also fuel white supremacy and colonial violence that can be expressed in dangerously physical ways. This chapter examines media’s engagement with archaeological approaches – mainstream, fringe, and pseudo – and their considerations of the people of the Americas. Cases in media coverage of pseudoarchaeological peopling of the Americas, more ‘scientific’ approaches in the Solutrean Hypothesis, and coverage of the controversial case of Kennewick Man are discussed for their contributions to the logic of elimination, anti-Indigenous violence, and narratives of white supremacy. This entry highlights how presenting archaeology is not neutral and while we may dismiss pseudoarchaeology, we must address it for the real damage it does. Not only this, but in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, more formal archaeologies and reporting around them can also replicate similar harm to marginalized people. Archaeologists must be responsible in action and mindful of the damage of settler colonialism in our work.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 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".