The Impact of Social, Economic and Political Change in Linear and Appositional Growth of Children from the Medieval Islamic and Christian Periods of the Algarve, Portugal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Growth can be used as a proxy for the stress experienced by the whole population. • Z-scores were used to compare the linear and appositional long bone growth of children. • No significant differences in growth were found between different Medieval time periods. • Differences in growth were found between different regions of Portugal. • Local environment has a greater impact on growth than religious or temporal differences. Archaeological data and historical research suggest that the Medieval Islamic Period (711-1249 A.D.) in Iberia was associated with conditions more favourable for child growth than the post-Islamic Christian Period (1249-1650 A.D.). This is due to agricultural prosperity, greater medical knowledge, and better hygienic practices of the former. As child growth is a sensitive indicator of environmental insults, it can be used as a proxy for the stress experienced by the whole population. The linear and appositional bone growth of 29 children (under the age of 12 years) recovered from archaeological sites in Silves and Cacela Velha - dating from the Medieval Islamic and Christian Period in the Algarve, Portugal - were compared to determine whether the environmental changes associated with the transition between these periods impacted the health and well-being of the populations. Age was estimated from tooth length. Linear growth of all long bones and the appositional growth of the femur and humerus at the midshaft were compared between periods using z-scores. Bone growth deficits were found among the medieval children in all samples. Overall, Islamic Period children had slightly greater growth deficits than Christian Period children, although these differences were not statistically significant. This finding suggests that neither Medieval Period was more favourable for growth. Statistically significant differences in appositional growth were found between the Medieval Santarém and Algarve populations, suggesting these differences to be related to the local environment, rather than religious or temporal differences within the Algarve or other regions of Portugal.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".