The Ditch and the House. Construction Energetics in Early 7th-century BC Megara Hyblaia: A Preliminary Study.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<ns3:p> <ns3:bold>Background:</ns3:bold> Megara Hyblaia, a Greek colony founded in the third quarter of the 8th century BC on Sicily’s eastern coast, exemplifies early Western Greek urbanism. By the early 7th century BC, Megara had likely reached its maximum intramural size of approximately 60 hectares. This study focuses on that formative phase to evaluate whether the community possessed the resources to undertake two key construction projects: the first city fortification and residential expansion. <ns3:bold>Methods:</ns3:bold> Archaeological evidence shows that residential structures spread across the Southern Plateau and toward the Archaic West Gate by the early 7th century BC. This urban spread correlates with the construction of the city’s earliest defensive structure, an “agger-wall”. The article investigates the feasibility of these projects using two case studies: the agger-wall and the house on plot 113W4. Using data from stratigraphic excavation, 3D modelling, Building Information Modelling (BIM), and architectural energetics, the study estimates construction time and labour requirements. <ns3:bold>Results</ns3:bold> The aforementioned methods allowed us to estimate the construction of the agger-wall defence line at 11478 p-d (person-day) and the building of the house on plot 113W4 at 187–196 p-d. These figures then need to be put into perspective with an estimated population of 404–538 individuals in the first quarter of the 7th century BC, of whom roughly half are considered fit for construction work and available for it for five to six months per year. <ns3:bold>Conclusions:</ns3:bold> In evaluating the feasibility of early construction projects at Megara Hyblaia, findings suggest that the second-generation population could have built both the fortifications and sufficient housing within a year, without disrupting agriculture or essential tasks. Thus, 7th-century BC inhabitants likely had sufficient workforce for fortifications and housing. This study also highlights the promise and limitations of BIM tools in reconstructing ancient architecture and informing future digital heritage research. </ns3:p>
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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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".