Calling Moose: A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Example of Northern Tutchone Scapulimancy from Fort Selkirk, Yukon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fort Selkirk, Yukon, was a site of contact between Northern Tutchone people and Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders in the mid-nineteenth century. During archaeological excavations in 2006, this article’s author recovered a unique moose (Alces alces) scapula, which provides evidence of early contact period Northern Tutchone hunting techniques and scapulimancy. A zoomorphic etching on the surface of the scapula depicts a large male ungulate, probably a moose, along with an arrow in flight by its head. To understand the context and significance of this artifact, the author interviewed Selkirk First Nation (Northern Tutchone) Elder Mr. Roger Alfred. He focused his responses on the scapula’s construction, its use, and the etching’s significance. By using a holistic approach that combines ethnohistorical information, and an oral ethnoarchaeology interview, this article offers insight into the cultural practices that Indigenous hunters use to call and locate moose in the North American subarctic. The Fort Selkirk scapula is a unique tangible example.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; 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".