“Those who were bound together”: illuminating Almoravid imperial entanglements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of the imperial Almoravid dynasty was an important catalyst for social, political and cultural change in the archaeological record of medieval North Africa. At the height of their power, the Almoravids controlled a very extensive territory centred around present-day Morocco and stretching from southern Mauritania to northern Iberia. Their takeover of al-Andalus and their military successes against the Christian kingdoms proved vital for the continued presence of Muslim rule in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula and illustrates a rare instance of African powers exerting territorial control over European soil. The control of trans-Saharan trade networks where West African gold flowed northwards, along with a desire to sustain the spread and strict adherence to Islamic religious ideology, were important drivers of Almoravid expansion. Control of bodies, souls and resources was also a fundamental dimension of imperialist expansion. This paper examines Almoravid material culture, particularly gold coins, as an unrivalled avenue with which to map archaeologically the interlinking imperial processes between Africa and Europe in which these artefacts were enmeshed by illustrating the complex relationship between gold sources, Almoravid coin minting localities and Western museum collections.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".