The Chemistry of Nueva Cadiz and Associated Beads: Technology and Provenience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dating to about 1500-1560, Nueva Cadiz beads are the earliest glass beads found in the Americas, and many questions regarding their technology and provenience surround them. Analysis of 10 beads from the namesake Nueva Cádiz site in Venezuela and 33 beads collected from an unknown site or sites near Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, provide chemical compositions of their turquoise, dark blue, white, red, and colorless glasses. We analyze the sand, flux, and colorants that went into their fabrication. The two collections show a common beadmaking tradition and provenience, except for three beads made of high-lime low-alkali (HLLA) glass. Colorants and opacifiers are cobalt for blue, a tin-based agent for white, and copper for turquoise and red. Trace elements associated with cobalt indicate a variable source for this colorant. By comparing the layers of composite beads, we discover technological aspects of bead design and workshop organization. To investigate provenience, we compare the levels of key elements with other glasses of proven origin. There are similarities with glasses made in Venice and Antwerp, identifying these places as candidates for the origin of Nueva Cadiz beads.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".