The Bear Gulch Obsidian Source and its Pre-Contact Indigenous Use Across North America
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bear Gulch obsidian has been reported through provenance studies at archaeological sites across Canada and the U.S. Our aims are to thoroughly sample its source in Idaho, provide a large dataset of geochemical results for future sourcing studies, and update continent-scale Bear Gulch obsidian distribution based on artifacts from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, Canada. Spatial data, photographs, and tabular results from outcrops are intended to inform fieldwork protocols at quarries. Our results indicate that Bear Gulch source samples (n = 202 from five localities along the Centennial Mountains) are geochemically homogenous. We also analyze 54 artifacts from western Canada indicating that pre-contact exchange of Bear Gulch obsidian extended from the Rocky Mountains across the Northern Plains. Bear Gulch obsidian is one of the most widely moved lithic toolstones by pre-contact Indigenous peoples in North America, with a total area of 3.6 million km2.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it