Stave-built wooden vessels from the Medieval Norse Greenlandic settlements: an overview of their diversity and potential uses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The craft of cooperage has been well established throughout Europe, at least since the Iron Age. During the medieval period, specialized coopers supplied a wide range of open-topped and sealed containers of various shapes and dimensions, used for numerous everyday domestic activities and more specialized and commercial purposes. In the Norse Greenlandic settlements, stave-built containers were even more important as other materials like ceramic, glass, or metal constituted luxury goods. This paper succinctly presents the archaeological evidence for the craft of coopering in medieval Norse Greenland and attempts to place it in a wider social and economic context. In all, some 631 items were examined, representing a large proportion of the available physical evidence. The finds were recovered from a diverse range of contexts, from domestic areas to storage buildings and midden deposits, and from elite manor sites to smaller farmsteads. Their chronology spans the entire Norse occupation of Greenland, from the late 10th to the mid-15th century. The methods of analysis allow the reconstitution of the stave-built vessels' morphological spectrum and the estimation of their original volumetric capacities. Several types of containers were identified, which could have been used in a wide range of domestic activities and more specialized crafts, such as tableware, dairy production, wool processing, or for storing large quantities of foodstuff.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".