Review of <i>Handbook of North American Indians</i> Volume 13. <i>Plains</i>. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INDIANS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS\nTo say that the Plains volume of the Smithsonian Institution's Handbook of North American Indians has been long awaited is a literal as well as a figurative verity. Research for the volume began in 1971, then stalled until 1985, when Raymond DeMallie took over as editor and reinvigorated the project. Still, progress remained slow until 1998, as other volumes in the series were given priority. Then an all-out push was made to complete the work: manuscripts written in the 1970s and 1980s were revised, often through the addition of a co-author, and the content was generally updated to reflect the state of knowledge in the 1990s. The last manuscript was accepted on 14 November 2000, a year before publication.\nThe wait was worthwhile. The final product is a comprehensive and scholarly synthesis of Plains Indian ways of life from 12,000 BCE to the 1990s, from the Prairies of Canada to the Rio Grande, and from archaeological records to tribal traditions. The volume (which comes in two parts of about seven hundred pages each) is handsomely presented: there are photographs on almost every page, each explicated in detail as to provenance and content in an accompanying caption, and frequent 217 maps expertly done. If the reader needs additional information beyond the mass of material in each chapter, the bibliography contains more than two hundred pages of references, drawn from many scholarly fields. DeMallie deserves praise not only for pulling it all together, but for his own chapter contributions seven in all, either as sole or joint author. It is a major accomplishment.\nBeneath the main content conveying the remarkable diversity and richness of Plains Indian societies, there is a subtext that reveals the ways anthropologists have interacted with and represented indigenous peoples. Most of the authors are anthropologists, with a sprinkling of historians and scholars from other disciplines. Only one scholar-JoAllyn Archambault-has a tribal affiliation noted in the list of contributors. Possibly there are other Native Americans here who chose not to give their tribal affiliation, but it seems they are poorly represented. There is a tradition of collaboration between anthropologists and Indian experts-Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, for example-and it would have been enterprising on the part of their writers to have co-authored some chapters in this manner.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".