Archaeologists Uncover 50,000 Years of History at Juukan Gorge

Target was 20-30 articles. Only 15 real, verified articles were found. Every hard regional minimum except Europe's cap was missed: Africa 2 (min 5), Asia 4 (min 5), Oceania 2 (min 3), Americas 3 (min 5). Europe was within its 40% ceiling (4/15 = 27%). This is a genuine research shortfall, not a quota-filling shortcut: the research pass ran well over 50 search/fetch calls (beyond the ~40-minute guideline) because many candidate stories turned out to be aggregator reposts of older announcements with a freshened page date (the "old articles recirculated" trap called out in the collection prompt) — e.g. a Turkey copper-workshop story from 7 weeks earlier, an 8-month-old Maya-city study, a 2.5-month-old Machu Picchu LiDAR story, an uncorroborable Troy "bone flute" claim, and an Egypt colossal-statues story whose original announcement predated the window. All of these were excluded rather than counted toward the target. Non-English local-language searches were also run for the under-covered regions per the prompt's requirement, without surfacing additional qualifying stories in the time spent. No article, URL, or field was fabricated to compensate.

Source diversity note: Archaeology Magazine supplied 6 of 15 articles (40%), above the prompt's 30% single-source guideline. This was a deliberate accuracy-over-diversity tradeoff — two candidate swaps to other outlets were rejected because their exact publication timestamps couldn't be independently confirmed (only relative/crawl timestamps were visible).

Pipeline step results:
- Clustering (6a): 2 calls. Call 1 created 15 new stories (total_unclustered reported as 15 per the response field, despite "remaining: 0" in the same payload — looped per the documented field per playbook instructions). Call 2 confirmed total_unclustered: 0. Stopped correctly, well under the 10-call cap.
- Fetch images (6b): 3 calls. total_found 5 → 2 → 0 (strictly decreasing, no stall). Totals: 7 processed, 3 succeeded, 3 failed, 1 generic/placeholder. Well under the 30-call cap.
- Refresh widgets (6c): 1 call, success (0 cache files needed clearing).
- Recalculate scores (6d): 1 call, success, 1406 stories processed, 154 cache files cleared.
- Fill keywords (6e): 1 call, done: true immediately (all stories already had keywords).

Verification (Step 8): all checks passed — imported > 0; 5 distinct regions present; last clustering call had stats_parsed: true and total_unclustered: 0; recalculate_scores processed_stories (1406) > 0 given imported > 0; stories_data.php?mode=all&limit=5 confirmed the newly imported stories (Juukan Gorge, Ugarit mission, Neanderthal hand bones, Patagonia penguin hunters, Westminster Abbey sarcophagus) are live with computed scores.