Examining colonial impact on Beothuk technological traditions on the Island of Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous technological production and use of tools is often influenced by several cultural factors including, functionality, environment, and cosmological and ideological beliefs. Projectile points are no exception, and they are often imbued with rich, symbolic meaning. While projectile points across North America have been extensively studied using various methods, there are some Indigenous groups and environments that are often excluded from academic, archaeological research, such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland. Since the Beothuk have seldom been the focus of archaeological research, their lithic and iron technology has not yet been analyzed thoroughly. I have conducted a systematic comparative analysis of changes in point technology to better understand how colonialism affected Beothuk technological traditions.The Beothuk have received less attention due to a lack of researchers working on the island, and that research is also hindered by preservation issues. Moreover, the Beothuk have gone culturally extinct, making it difficult to assess their history without collaboration from living descendant populations. Both limitations have led to an imbalance of archaeological research and knowledge, skewed toward those Indigenous groups whose voices are still prevalent on the landscape. As colonialism became more prevalent in Newfoundland throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Beothuk were confronted with many new developments, such as the introduction of European-made iron goods. The Beothuk incorporated some European materials into their cultural practices while rejecting others. The Beothuk made strategic decisions regarding technological production and use based on their understanding of various materials’ technological efficiency, environmental resource availability, and associated ideological and cosmological beliefs. The research conducted for this dissertation allowed for an in-depth analysis of the diachronic changes in Beothuk technological traditions. Since technology is more than just functional, I was also able to analyze how Beothuk belief systems and ideological practices may have been influenced by these changes as well.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".