Unbalanced social–ecological acceleration led to state formation failure in early medieval Poland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapid social-ecological intensification is a recurrent feature of human history. It occurred in different forms and contexts; its outcomes may have been sustainable or transient. Until recently, such intensifications usually accompanied state formation: Consolidation of political power was often coupled with exponential increase in human exploitation of the environment of a given area. Here, we study one such case, uniquely well-documented through our rich paleoecological, archaeological, numismatic, and literary data. Triggered by the Eurasian slave trade, the first "Polish" polity was founded in Central Europe c. 900 common era. It undertook unprecedented ecological intensification in its core territory, connected with large construction projects, and engaged in rapid territorial expansion. We provide new crucial evidence on this process by publishing here a high-resolution pollen profile from a location close to the polity's capital and by an application of social network analysis to numismatic data. This state collapsed within a few generations after its foundation. The collapse of the political elites, however, did not produce a complete social and ecological disintegration of the polity's former core region. We thus show how collapse and continuity can remain closely intertwined. Last but not least, the rich evidence on the mechanism of the collapse reveals that successful maintenance of social-ecological intensification requires reliance on a number of cultural, economic, religious, and social networks underlying the political expansion. The polity's elite lacked access to or failed to mobilize such networks, which led to its demise.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".