Learning from the best: palaeo-Inuit novice flintknapping on southern Baffin Island
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates two aspects of Palaeo-Inuit lithic quarry use in the eastern Arctic. The first is the place of the LbDt-1 quarry in the established lithic reduction continuum on southern Baffin Island and to investigate how Palaeo-Inuit peoples structured their use of this site. The second is the social role of LbDt-1 as a place where novice flintknappers had their first opportunity to gain practical experience breaking rocks. A multi-method approach that combines individual attribute and aggregate analyses is applied to the lithic debitage from LbDt-1. The results indicate that lithic activities at LbDt-1 were limited to the earliest stages of the lithic reduction and a high frequency of novice mistakes point to use of the site by inexperienced flintknappers. Comparison of the LbDt-1 debitage assemblage to extant data from four Pre-Dorset habitation sites located in the interior and on the coast (Milne 2003) indicates a higher frequency of novice errors at the quarry and the two interior sites compared to the coastal sites. This suggests that the LbDt-1 quarry, and the interior region more generally, was the preferred location for novices to gain experience in flintknapping. Further, the debitage patterns identified at LbDt-1 represent only the earliest stages of lithic reduction and lack evidence of tool production. In this way, the LbDt-1 assemblage does not resemble a typical quarry, and contradicts the expectation of the field processing model that a quarry located at a significant distance from habitation sites would have debitage from the full reduction sequence (see Beck et al. 2002). Lithic activities at LbDt-1 did not emphasize efficient chert extraction, but rather the social decisions made by Palaeo-Inuit people, who had determined that the interior was the appropriate place for teaching novices to flintknap (Milne 2014:110). The abundance of chert available in the interior compared to on the coast was no doubt a significant determinant in the association of the interior region with chert procurement and novice learning (Milne 2003, 2005, 2014).
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 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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".