Swidden pollen spectra are unique, having no modern analogues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Slash-and-burn cultivation (SABC), a widespread premodern agricultural practice, shaped vegetation across the temperate zone of Eurasia for millennia, yet the SABC-associated plant communities and their modern analogues remain poorly understood. We compared 74 fossil pollen spectra from radiocarbon-dated swidden horizons with 223 modern surface soil spectra using non-metric multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. The results show that slash-and-burn cultivation creates a unique palynological assemblage in soil, distinguishable from forests, meadows, fallows, and ruderal habitats. This signature was most pronounced in sites from broad-leaved coniferous forest, where cryptogam diversity was highest. Here, we report that pollen spectra from buried swidden soils across the Eastern European forest zone consistently form a distinct and cohesive cluster, lacking modern analogues. These spectra are characterized by high proportions of Betula, Tilia, Epilobium angustifolium , cereal pollen, and a diverse assemblage of spores ( Marchantia, Lycopodium, Pteridium ), reflecting a mosaic of post-cultivation successional stages. Insect activity, particularly pollen-storing burrows of ground-nesting bees, may enhance the swidden signal through selective accumulation of fireweed entomophilous pollen. Our results provide SABC reference pollen spectra for temperate mixed and deciduous forest zones and can be used as a tool for reconstructing the extinct suite of plant communities associated with swidden cultivation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".