Shamanism among the indigenous cultures of North America: Selected aspects of archaeological traces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Certain forms of shamanism existed in many communities worldwide, including some of the indigenous cultures and tribes of North America, from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and the desert areas of the Southwest, California, and northern Mexico. At least several American Indian and Inuit societies are known to have practised shamanism in bothpre-Columbian and other historical periods (even until very recent times). We can conclude this on the basis of various archaeological and ethnographic sources, including specific burials, interpreted as shamanic, as well as iconography of pottery and rock art imagery (paintings and petroglyphs) placed on rocks, boulders, and canyon walls, which offera profound insight into the beliefs of ancient societies. This article presents selected examples of archaeological evidence of shamanism in several cultures of the Eastern Woodlands and the Southwest of the pre-Columbian North America, with an emphasis on rock art depictions, and to some extent burials, the iconography of pottery, and other artefacts.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".