Geographic Information System Analyses of Precontact Stone Features at the Forks of the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer Rivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta exists an area known as the Forks, where the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer rivers meet. It is within the Forks area that Drs. Margaret Kennedy and Brian Reeves conducted archaeological surveys to identify and record a wide variety of stone features across a large area that is approximately 20km west-east and 13.5km north-south. This thesis employed a combination of data obtained from Dr. Kennedy that describes the position and feature type of stone features within the area, with publicly available data from Geogratis that provided hydrological, topological, and elevation maps for the research area. Additional information was obtained through field research conducted in 2019. These data are analyzed through geographic information system processes using ESRI’s ArcMap. Investigations conducted include determining directionality of gaps in stone rings through spatial plotting, viewshed analysis, least cost path analysis, and spatial autocorrelation of the 1,203 stone feature points identified by Drs. Reeves and Kennedy. It was hypothesized that the most prominent stone feature of the area, the Bull’s Forehead Medicine Wheel (aka Roy Rivers Medicine Wheel) (EfOl-2), would have served as a magnet for locations of other stone features within the area. The goal of this thesis is to compare possible environmentally caused spatial patterns with possible ceremonial significance reflected through the patterning of the stone features. This project was able to identify some spatial patterns and significance between the stone features of the area. Namely, it is the clustering of stone features that aids in elucidating possible ceremonial significance of the location, whereas visibility has been determined to not be a factor. One clear result is that the Forks area would benefit from further archaeological study. The results contradicted the initial hypotheses. The Bull’s Forehead Medicine Wheel serves as a significant stone feature, but it was not overly visible to single-gap rings or other stone features. In addition, most single-gap rings were not pointing east to correspond with the rising sun theory. Least cost path analysis and spatial autocorrelation have pointed towards different clusters of stone features existing in proximity to medicine wheels, however.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".