A multi-scalar palynological investigation of plant- and land-use at a Mesolithic occupation site in central Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent research on the archaeobotanical and pollen records from north-west Europe has suggested that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers actively shaped woodland environments. These early communities created small-scale clearances, exploited a variety of wild plants, and possibly managed specific taxa. Interpretation of such activities is complicated by the influences of herbivory and the challenges posed by spatial and temporal resolution. Despite tantalizing evidence suggesting that hunter-gatherers in Ireland engaged in plant management and forest clearance, the environmental impacts of these practices remain enigmatic. In this paper, we present multi-scalar palaeoenvironmental records from Derragh, an exceptionally rich multi-period site in central Ireland. The results provide insights into the environmental evolution of the locality, including likely episodic flooding of the site that may have necessitated the deliberate build-up of deposits on the site during its occupation. Despite archaeological evidence for extensive plant use and burning on site, the pollen records show no unambiguous signals of woodland disturbances that can clearly be distinguished from hydrologically-driven vegetation responses. We hypothesise that the site’s proximity to fringe woodland contributed to over-representation of woodland taxa and limited the dispersal of pollen and microcharcoal. Our findings raise questions about the scale of woodland disturbances needed to be perceptible in pollen records and highlight the limitations of pollen records from woodland settings to explore Mesolithic vegetation impacts.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".