Revisiting Pniel 6: the 2017-2019 excavations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lithic artefacts from the terraces along the lower Vaal River have been identified since the early 20th century. Pniel 6, in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, is one such archaeological site known to have revealed both lithics and faunal remains in previous excavations. We re-investigated Pniel 6 with high-resolution modern fieldwork techniques. Our objectives are to reassess the lithic assemblages at the site and to give a precise stratigraphic description of the sedimentary deposits, enabling us to assess the integrity of the archaeological assemblage. We present a report from three seasons (2017-2019) of archaeological fieldwork at Pniel 6 in four new excavation areas. Our results show technological affinities to other transitional Early/Middle Pleistocene sites in the region, but Pniel 6 stands out among them as a lithic assemblage predominantly made from hornfels. Blades and points from prepared cores are frequent, while large cutting tools are absent. The most coherent assemblage, from Area 3, was likely formed through localised alluvial deposition with subsequent colluvial aggregation. The site expands our understanding of the ESA-MSA transition in the interior of southern Africa. It highlights how hominins applied common methods of stone tool production using distinctly different raw materials with varying properties, even within relatively small regional distances.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".