Increased C4 cultivation and consumption as an impetus for population growth at Badia Pozzeveri, Italy (11th–13th centuries CE)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• The diet of the people buried at Badia Pozzeveri was mainly a mix of C 3 and C 4 terrestrial resources. • 15 of the analysed individuals experienced dietary changes over their lives. • Late Medieval diets in northwest Tuscany were characterized by increased millet consumption. • The gradual shift to millet consumption was likely due to population growth. The focus of this study is to target the paucity of bioarchaeological information related to the population growth that characterized the Late Middle Ages in Italy. Specifically, we used stable isotope analysis to investigate the potential dietary changes caused by this phenomenon in a medieval population (11th–13th centuries CE) from Badia Pozzeveri (Lucca), Tuscany, Italy. Bone collagen from both ribs and long bones of 44 individuals was analysed for bulk carbon (δ 13 C) and nitrogen (δ 15 N) isotopic values and a subset of 10 individuals for sulfur (δ 34 S) isotopic values. Human δ 13 C values range from −20.1‰ to −13.4 ‰, with a mean value of −17.2 ‰ ± 1.5 ‰. The human δ 15 N values range from 7.4 ‰ to 11.2 ‰, with a mean value of 9.6 ‰ ± 0.8 ‰. The human δ 34 S values range from 7.6 ‰ to 10.8 ‰ (mean value 9.2 ‰ ± 1.2 ‰). The isotopic results indicate that the diet was a mix of C 3 and C 4 terrestrial resources, with possible small inputs from freshwater resources of the nearby Sesto Lake. Isotopic offsets between the ribs and long bones found that 15 individuals experienced a dietary change over the course of their lives. Thanks to a well-defined stratigraphy that distinguishes between phase one (11th century CE) and phase two (12th–13th centuries C), the isotopic evidence of this study indicates an increased reliance on C 4 plants, likely millet, during the 12th–13th centuries CE in northwest Tuscany. This suggests that there was a gradual shift from C 3 resources to millet consumption, likely in response to the increasing population of this region during this period.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".