An Inconvenient Corpse: Settler Adaptation to Winter Death and Burial through Structural and Oral History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the archaeology of death and burial is a popular avenue of research, considerations for burial practices during winter months in northerly climates when temperatures regularly drop below 0°C / 32°F aren’t regularly considered. Excavations in search of the early 17th-century burials associated with Sir George Calvert’s English colony in Ferryland, Newfoundland considered different options for winter body disposal. While burial on land presented the most plausible option in the colonial period, deaths during the winter would have posed a problem for settlers. With limited options for digging in frozen ground, the storage of dead bodies during the winter became commonplace throughout North America. The practice dominated the northeast coast in particular, but was not the only option. This paper explores the logistics of early winter burial practices such as winter storage and grave digging through structural evidence and oral testimony, and considers how these practices were adapted throughout the 18th to 21st centuries.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".