Bibliographic record
Abstract
A new approach to the study of long barrows of the Early and Mid-Neolithic in centralsouthern England is proposed and assessed. The emphasis is on northern Wessex and contiguous areas. Account is taken of the self-orientation of long barrows within a landscape context, and purposeful relationships are revealed in connection with notable sunrise events for the majority. Over 60 long barrows were investigated, and fresh insights and deductions resulted. This helped to establish that Neolithic Britons were making use of an eight-period, agricultural calendar-year in the most general sense, with intervals between dates or festivals amounting to 45-46 days. Primary dates were the solstices, equinoxes and quarter days. No astronomy, properly speaking, is implied. It was a matter of counting days, as could be done by tally-sticks, and knowing the day of the year by recognising the position on the horizon where the sun rose. The frequency with which the sun appears to have been viewed at the horizon suggests open sightline corridors between observer and rising sun. Besides this, some support is found for an interest in the moon, seeing that seven long barrows appear to be aligned with extreme northerly or extreme southerly moonrises. The manner in which long barrows are configured in the landscape of the Avebury area and the Wylye/Salisbury Plain area hints at a conscious awareness of a patterning based on agro-pastoral land-units. The region of five long barrows centred on Windmill Hill and its Causewayed Enclosure is suggested as a meaningful prototype perhaps applicable to other territories. Viewing the British monuments through landscape archaeology in this way—i.e. combining landscape considerations and digital elevation modelling with simple celestial study—adds to our understanding of the perceptions, actions and beliefs of the monument builders and users.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".