Sedimentary biomarkers and bone specimens reveal a history of prehistoric occupation on Somerset Island (Arctic Canada)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archaeological studies of pre-historic Arctic cultures are often limited to artefacts and architecture; such records may be incomplete and often do not provide a continuous record of past occupation. Here, we used lake sediment archives to supplement archaeological evidence to explore the history of Thule and Dorset populations on Somerset Island, Nunavut (Canada). We examined biomarkers in dated sediment cores from two ponds adjacent to abandoned Thule settlements (PaJs-3 and PaJs-13) and compared these to sediment cores from two ponds without past human occupation. Coprostanol and epicoprostanol, δ 15 N measurements, sedimentary chlorophyll a and the ratio of diatom valves to chrysophyte cysts were elevated in the dated sediment profiles at both sites during Thule and Dorset occupations. Periods of pronounced human impact during the Thule occupation of the site were corroborated by 14 C-dated caribou bones found at both sites that identified intense caribou hunting between ca 1185 and 1510 CE. Notably, these sediment core data show evidence of the Dorset occupation from ca 200 to 500 CE at sites where archaeological evidence was heretofore lacking. We highlight the utility of lake sediments in assisting archaeological studies to better establish the timings, peak occupations and even lifestyle practices of the Dorset and Thule Arctic peoples.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".