Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines a white jade cicada from the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, exploring its material, symbolic, and ritual significance within early Chinese funerary culture. The cicada is an insect associated with periodic molting, and it has become a metaphor for rebirth and immortality. During the Han Dynasty, cicadas were carved in jade or other stones and placed on the tongues of the deceased, signifying the preservation of the soul and the wish of rebirth. Methodologically, the paper integrates archaeological contextual analysis with textual analysis of Han Dynasty classics, such as the Book of Rites (Liji) and Huainanzi. It places the jade cicada within both Daoist beliefs and Confucian frameworks of filial piety. A comparative analysis of this artifact alongside twenty-one cicadas in the ROM collection, dating from the Shang to Qing dynasties, allows for a broader understanding of the material choices and craftsmanship of this specific jade cicada. By comparing jade cicadas with examples made of glass or stone, the paper highlights how material quality and carving techniques reinforced social hierarchies in funerary practice and how the deceased's social status was associated with the materiality. The paper further investigates the role of jade’s materiality, including its durability, beauty, and philosophical implications, and explores its function as an elite funerary object. Through the close examination of the materiality of white Hetian jade, which was imported via the Silk Road, the paper finally explores the cultural exchange in the Han. Ultimately, the jade cicada served dual functions: for the deceased, it showed their wishes of immortality and rebirth; for the living, it expressed their filial piety to their family members through the use of precious materials. Through the perspective of material culture, this single artifact thus reflects a broader social and cultural background in Han Dynasty China.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".