Ravenscroft (34BV198) Bison Skull Piles: Explorations of Purpose and Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ravenscroft is a late Paleoindian arroyo bison kill located along a tributary of the Canadian River named Bull Creek in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Multiple field seasons eventually identified two stacks of bison skulls at the mouth of the arroyo. All but one of the skulls were missing mandibles. None of the skulls exhibited bashing, suggesting they were not set aside for brain removal. Two arroyos were identified, labeled RAV I and RAV II. Further complicating interpretations of purpose were the returned radiocarbon dates. Included in the piles were skulls representing at least three of the five kill events. These skulls span over 300 years of history, implying a much more complex purpose than subsistence or stockpiling. Through further analysis and comparison with other occurrences of stacked skulls worldwide, this thesis explores the potentially ritualistic aspects of this site and attempts to explain the purpose of the stacked skulls.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.691 | 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".