Assessing ancient conflict landscapes through KOCOA analysis: the case of Burnswark hillfort (SW Scotland)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper applies KOCOA terrain analysis to the study of the Iron Age hillfort of Burnswark Hill (SW Scotland) and its associated Roman military remains. The Roman camps and projectiles identified at Burnswark have sparked a long scholarly debate, with views ranging from authors that interpret the evidence as related to Roman military training at an already abandoned hillfort, and others who consider it representative of a brutal Roman military attack on an indigenous stronghold. This article presents the recently undertaken KOCOA analysis of the site, which assesses how the terrain influenced the conduct of the Roman intervention at Burnswark. The results are used in conjunction with the insights provided by the metal detector surveys and excavations from the last decade. The combined evidence strongly suggests that the events at Burnswark can best be described as a Roman oppugnatio longinqua obsidio, an active siege that ended in a storming assault.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".