Cracknie, Borgie and the souterrains of the northern mainland of Scotland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The souterrains of the northern mainland comprise a distinctive group within the wider national distribution: they are stone-built, narrow with massive lintels and typically associated with hut-circle settlements. Most are known from antiquarian records or from the RCAHMS survey of Sutherland in 1911, and there has been very little investigation of them since; aside from the excavation of an example at Cyderhall Farm in south-east Sutherland and limited investigation at Upper Suisgill, virtually no new data have been contributed since that time. In 2012, Forestry and Land Scotland commissioned the 3D laser scan survey of one example at Cracknie, Borgie, for the purposes of informing conservation management. This led to the excavation of the entrance to the passage and consolidation of the opening in 2022, at which point samples suitable for radiocarbon dating were obtained. These indicate that activity was taking place around the Cracknie souterrain in the early Middle Iron Age, probably around the early 2nd century BC. This paper discusses the Cracknie souterrain in the context of the north mainland group, along with a note on the discovery of a new example at Borgie in 1997, recorded by the late Paul Humphreys, and suggests that the northern stone souterrains should be considered among the earliest such sites to be constructed, and that they probably originated towards the end of the third quarter of the 1st millennium BC.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".