Early Upper Palaeolithic marine mollusc exploitation at Riparo Bombrini (Balzi Rossi, Italy): shellfish consumption and ornament production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research explores the modes of exploitation of marine molluscs at Riparo Bombrini (Ventimiglia, north-west Italy) during the Protoaurignacian and the Early Aurignacian. Our results prove that Early Modern Humans who inhabited the rockshelter extensively exploited marine malacofauna for both dietary purposes and ornament production, offering new insights into human adaptation to coastal environments during the early phases of the Upper Palaeolithic along the Mediterranean coast. Combining taxonomy and taphonomy, we identified five main categories of shell remains within the assemblage: edible specimens, shell beads, non-worked ornamental shells, accidental introductions, and potential ornamental shells. A total of 91 perforated gastropods were recovered during the excavations of the Early Upper Palaeolithic layers. The ornament assemblage shows a certain richness in mollusc species, whose shells were collected dead from the beach. However, a preference for spherical and semi-spherical shells can be observed, highlighting the existence of trends in the selection of shell species for bead production. Use wear analysis demonstrates that some of the shell beads exhibit rounding and polishing around the rim of the perforation, implying that most of them arrived at the site as worn components, possibly forming part of more complex decorative combinations. Finally, the presence of both perforated and unperforated shells interpretable as raw material suggests that the rockshelter served as a "manufacturing site", where shell ornaments were fabricated, discarded and replaced in new beadworks. This hypothesis is further supported by the presence of broken shell beads, interpretable as manufacturing errors or worn beads ready for replacement. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12520-024-02148-5.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".