A preliminary study of culturally modified sugarbag trees in the Laura Sandstone Basin, Cape York Peninsula, Queensland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Erythrophleum spp. (Cooktown ironwood) is an endemic north Australian tree that is a key cultural resource. In Cape York Peninsula (CYP), Traditional Owners value, use, care for and manage the trees in culturally appropriate ways. Members of the Agayrr Bamangay Milbi (ABM) Project team have recorded hundreds of culturally modified Cooktown ironwood trees (CMTs) across southeast CYP, stretching from Jowalbinna in the south to Cape Melville in the north. In this paper we specifically discuss CMTs with evidence of sugarbag extraction. These trees provide a chronological sequence of technology (from stone to steel axes) and an important, if vulnerable, material record of natural resource procurement, cultural knowledge and connections to Country. We show how the significance of sugarbag trees is reflected not only in their ubiquity but also in the iconography of rock art, other cultural associations and archaeological values. A dearth of metal-cut sugarbag scars – in stark contrast to elsewhere in CYP and despite an abundance of such axes circulating amongst Aboriginal groups in the region – is posited to be related to the especially violent local contact history associated with mining. We discuss trends in distribution that invite more detailed studies of the environmental distribution of the Cooktown ironwood and of the contemporary distribution of native bees, noting that non-cultural burning and land-clearing practices represent ongoing threats to CMT survival in the region.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".