The Zooarchaeology of kā-kī-māmawēpihk (EfNg-1)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
kā-kī-māmawēpihk (EfNg-1) is a Morlach phase, Pericolonial period site with occupations ranging from the 15th to 17th centuries. The site is located in a coulee near Last Mountain Lake in southern Saskatchewan. This site has been involved with many different eras of archaeological inquiry in Saskatchewan, from the early days of curious post-dust-bowl Saskatchewan farmers, the first archaeological survey in 1951, test excavations in the 1960s and 1970s, to field schools conducted in the 1990s. Mortlach pottery, lithics, trade goods, bone tools, ice-gliders, other modified objects, and thousands of fragmented faunal remains were recovered during looting and systematic excavations. Despite the intermittent work on the site over many decades, the large faunal collection has not been comprehensively and systematically analyzed. Now housed primarily between the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the Canadian Museum of History, the assemblage has been minimally analyzed in the past, but the results are primarily unpublished. Using zooarchaeological methods, a clearer picture of the site’s activities and Mortlach subsistence strategies have been established. This thesis research resulted in the comprehensive and systematic analysis of the kā-kī-māmawēpihk faunal collections from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the Canadian Museum of History. Using the comparative collection at the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Dr. Robert Losey, the overall taxonomic composition of the assemblage was determined, with bison being the most prevalent, followed by canids (dogs, wolves, coyotes, and foxes). One of the most intriguing identifications were two horse elements, which are rare in pre-colonial archaeological assemblages in Saskatchewan. Through more thorough radiocarbon dating, a better chronology of the site was formed, which suggests a single occupation is highly unlikely. The seasonality of the site was better established using fetal bison specimens, which have indicated cold season occupation(s) ranging from November to April. Through the comparison of these results with other Mortlach phase faunal analyses, a general trend of cold season bison hunting and small animal trapping emerges. The identification of kā-kī-māmawēpihk as a primarily cold season site adds further evidence to support ethnographic and ethnohistoric descriptions of cold season hunting and settlement in this region of the Great Plains. This project has demonstrated the importance of revisiting old collections with new perspectives and new technologies.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".