Cooking, cleaning, and tossing: high-resolution analysis of domestic activities at the Mid-Neolithic site of Molino Casarotto (Vicenza, NE Italy)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Middle Neolithic lakeshore site of Molino Casarotto (4700 - 4400 cal BCE; Vicenza province, northern Italy) preserves some of the most informative deposits related to Neolithic daily life in Italy. The organisation and use of space within the Neolithic domestic contexts remain poorly understood, largely due to the limited preservation of archaeological evidence. At Molino Casarotto, however, these aspects can be explored thanks to the presence of domestic hearth rake-out layers and shell middens, which form substantial accumulations interdigitating with repeatedly renovated cooking plates. Several heated stones were recovered in association with these combustion structures. High-resolution sediment analyses (micromorphology, micro-FTIR, and XRD) allowed for the characterisation of the sediments used to construct the cooking plates, the reconstruction of combustion temperatures, and gave insights into mollusc cooking techniques. In particular, the discarded shells were likely boiled or roasted at low temperatures (< 200 °C), as indicated by the absence of microstructural alterations and the preservation of aragonite, possibly using heated stones. In contrast, thermally altered shells embedded in ash layers suggest exposure to post-depositional heating events. Eventual isotopic analyses should therefore take into account the taphonomic history of the specimens, as differential preservation may occur even across short distances. Finally, although structural remains at the site were limited, microarchaeological evidence indicates that the cooking plates were used within a sheltered area characterised by rapid and continuous sediment accumulation, with no evidence of abandonment. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12520-025-02353-w.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".