Stirrup Jars, Coastal Exchange, and Value in the Late Bronze Age Aegean (1470–1075 BC)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is generally assumed that transport stirrup jars functioned within a tightly monitored political economy in the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age, the many jars found outside palatial contexts unsettle this model. To explain the presence of these jars and their role outside the palatial sphere, this article provides a quantitative contextual analysis of transport stirrup jars in the LB II–IIIC period (1420–1075 BC). The data suggest that at least some stirrup jars circulated outside a palatial political economy and that their distribution can be attributed to the agency of merchants. Contrasting patterns of consumption of these jars are also apparent: at palatial sites they were more frequently stockpiled for use in commensal events, while those from non-palatial sites were deposited in ritual contexts. Thus, stirrup jars from palatial sites appear to have been valued for their contents, while those from non-palatial sites were valued as singular possessions. I suggest that this difference can be explained by the way that the meaning of these objects changed as they moved between social realms. Stirrup jars found outside palatial contexts testify to a broader network of exchange involving non-elite actors, as well as to differing sets of values that were actively contested through consumption practices.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".