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The Sixty-Year Cliff
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Maya monuments routinely record events that happened long before the stone was dedicated, and the distribution of that retrospection gap is a probe of what sculptors' patrons could actually consult. Oral memory has a well-documented horizon of roughly two to three generations; written archives have no such horizon. The conjecture: retrospection gaps in the dated corpus are bimodal — a dense mode inside the living-memory window and a separate archival tail running centuries deep toward dynastic founders — with a measurable trough between them marking the point where courts switched from witnesses to documents. The mechanism is evidentiary economics: within living memory you cite elders; beyond it you cite books, and only events that made it into books remain citable at all, thinning the record precisely at the oral horizon. If the conjecture holds, the lost dynastic archives become visible as a statistical shelf: precisely dated events too old for any witness, sourced from documents that are now ash.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Compute dedication-date minus event-date for all securely read retrospective event records, with a sensitivity variant excluding mythological deep-time dates. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the gap distribution is significantly bimodal with an antimode between roughly 50 and 90 years (p < 0.05 against unimodal fits). Secondary clause: deep-tail events (gap over 150 years) concentrate at large, long-lived sites, where archives would plausibly have accumulated.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): dated event and dedication records supply the retrospection-gap distribution.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Maya retrospective dating, the reworking/rewriting of dynastic history, and oral-vs-archival memory horizons are all treated in the memory-work literature (Gillespie), but the specific prediction of a bimodal retrospection-gap distribution with an antimode at the ~50-90-year oral horizon marking a witness-to-document switch is un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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