Isotopic evidence of increased societal diversification in Pre-Columbian Panama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Pre-Columbian history of Panama stands in unique contrast to the state-level societies of Mesoamerica to the north and the Andes to the south. Characterized by a network of powerful chiefdoms at the time of the Spanish arrival in the early 16th century, paleoecological and archaeological evidence indicates that the inhabitants of the isthmus had begun practicing horticulture with early domestic plants by 7000 BCE and adopted ceramic technology around 2500 BCE, both of which were earlier than most of the North and Central American continent. The development of the sociocultural sphere of chiefdoms that arose in this region between 200 BCE - 1500 CE is still not well understood. Focusing on one of the largest sites excavated to date in Panama, Cerro Juan Díaz, this study uses isotopes (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium) from bone and tooth enamel of 49 human individuals combined with preexisting isotopic data from nearby sites to understand the diet and mobility patterns of humans in ancient Panama. While the earlier centuries of life at Cerro Juan Díaz are marked by a consistent diet of maize and marine resources among most members of the community, by 700 CE a shift occurs where both diets and movements among individuals become highly variable. By 1150 CE, distinct isotopic differences emerge between sexes and between adults and children, revealing evidence of increasingly diverse social roles and mortuary practices. We interpret these results considering other archaeological and ethnohistoric records from the region to understand social trends that occurred in Panama throughout the 1500 years before Spanish contact.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".