A New Look at the Besant Phase in the Eastern Slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Besant phase is a Late Middle Precontact culture lasting from ca. 2,200 to 1,200 years ago, and found throughout the northern Plains region. Although sites attributed to the Besant phase have been recorded in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta since the 1960s, its presence there is not well understood. The conventional view of the Besant phase in Alberta is that it appears rarely in the Eastern Slopes, where it is confined to the foothills of the southern drainages. However, this model does not account for the growing number of sites found elsewhere in the Canadian Rocky Mountains over the last three decades. The present research uses a regional approach to document all known locations of Besant projectile points and sites recorded in the Eastern Slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Archaeological data indicating that people affiliated with the Besant phase used the Eastern Slopes from the foothills to the main ranges, and from the Waterton River drainage to the Smoky River drainage are presented and evaluated. The results expand our understanding of the Besant culture and its adaptation to mountain regions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".