One Thousand and One Conjectures

Bronze Age route networks around Mesopotamian tells should match Physarum-style optimal transport given tell sizes as sources. Falsify: CORONA-imagery hollow-way maps vs simulation.

The distance-decay exponent of obsidian steps down sharply when seafaring arrives — transport revolutions visible as breaks in one constant. Falsify: sourced Melos and Anatolian distributions through time.

Baltic amber finds fit an advection–diffusion equation with rivers as channels and a measurable "diffusivity" per era. Falsify: FTIR-sourced find maps.

The Shannon entropy of shipwreck cargo composition falls a generation before political fragmentation — markets disintegrate first. Falsify: Parker/Strauss wreck databases.

Daughter houses space themselves by competitive exclusion into a tessellation with a minimum-distance rule, violated only along wool routes. Falsify: foundation geodata.

The fair calendar is a solved traveling-merchant problem: dates minimize total circuit dead-time, and its wartime breakdown measurably rerouted trade to sea. Falsify: calendar optimization plus toll series.

Kontor privileges track member cities' route-control Shapley values and re-rank after route shocks. Falsify: privilege lists vs network model.

The Byzantine fire-signal chain sits at viewshed-redundancy optima under fog noise — reliability maximization, not station minimization. Falsify: GIS viewshed analysis vs alternative sitings.

Iron Age fort intervisibility graphs are small-world, and abandonment sequences preserve connectivity — graceful degradation. Falsify: DEM viewsheds plus dating.

Route alignments fit Wardrop user-equilibrium (individually shortest time), not system optimum; imperial upgrades target exactly the congestion externalities. Falsify: least-cost GIS vs surveyed alignments.

Mother-well spacing follows aquifer drawdown-interference radii — hydraulic property rights fossilized as geometry. Falsify: satellite qanat maps vs aquifer parameters.

Piece-form boundaries (elephant becoming bishop) should coincide with documented rule-variant boundaries — objects tracking rules across Eurasia. Falsify: find typology vs textual rules.

Gradient error accumulates as √distance between inspection shafts — surveying as a bounded random walk with resets. Falsify: laser-level surveys of Nîmes and Segovia channels.

Successive Gothic campaigns move monotonically toward the thrust-line optimum — iterative structural learning with a measurable decreasing loss. Falsify: dated buttress geometries under limit analysis.

Cathedral heights escalate against rivals within a diocesan radius by roughly fixed increments until the material frontier (Beauvais's collapse sits exactly there). Falsify: height/date/distance panel.

Statue sizes follow competitive-escalation dynamics ending at a resource frontier, predicting the largest unfinished statue lies at the feasibility boundary. Falsify: size chronology plus transport energetics.

Roman camp grid defects behave as crystal dislocations concentrated at terrain stress, and defect density separates marching camps from permanent forts. Falsify: geophysical survey plans.

Dimensional standardization (CV of amphorae and lamps) falls as a power law of cumulative regional output — the learning curve, two millennia early. Falsify: typology metrics vs production estimates.

Ceramic firing temperatures decline during deforestation episodes — kilns as energy-scarcity gauges. Falsify: refiring tests vs pollen/charcoal records.

The recycling fraction in Roman glass (antimony–manganese mixing) rises with political crisis and distance from Levantine furnaces — a business-cycle indicator in silica. Falsify: compositional time series through the 3rd century.

Pre-theoretic builders converged on a diameter-to-length power law near modern acoustic optima — empirical physics before physics. Falsify: measured medieval pipework.

Founding-pitch standards diffuse along rivers and trade routes, forming dialect-like isogloss maps. Falsify: dated bell frequency surveys.

Regional ship lengths avoid resonant pitching in local wave spectra: Baltic and Atlantic wreck length distributions should differ exactly as wave climatology predicts. Falsify: wreck dimension databases.

Viking plank widths and scarf spacing sit at the crack-arrest optimum for oak — naval architecture as fracture mechanics. Falsify: ship-timber metrology plus material testing.

Standard dispersion (cubit rods, brick molds) tightens under strong dynasties and loosens in intermediate periods — measurement variance as a government-strength index. Falsify: museum metrology by period.

3D-scanned step erosion ranks pilgrimage volumes; wear-derived rankings should match offering and indulgence registers. Falsify: scans along the Compostela routes.

Exchequer tally notch geometry encodes redundancy beyond face value — anti-fraud bits in a split physical token. Falsify: metrology of surviving tallies for non-value-bearing regularities.

Cylinder-seal engraving complexity scales with the holder's transaction exposure — forgery cost calibrated to forgery incentive. Falsify: glyptic entropy vs archive roles.

Unopened clay envelope-bullae let us measure ancient audit failure: token–marking mismatch rates should be near zero normally and spike at institutional collapse. Falsify: CT programs on museum bullae.

The Dresden Codex Venus corrections walk the optimal Stern–Brocot path toward the true synodic period — best-rational-approximation arithmetic. Falsify: the codex's own correction scheme.

Post-1200 church orientation errors should trace the geomagnetic declination curve — dating compass adoption in the building trades and refining archaeomagnetism at once. Falsify: orientation databases vs paleo-declination.

Chart accuracy per route scales as 1/√(voyage traffic) — maps as averaged compass logs. Falsify: cartometric route error vs traffic proxies.

Roman colonial grid azimuths match sunrise on foundation-festival dates, so grids encode founding dates we've lost. Falsify: azimuths vs the colonies whose dates we know.

Cairo grain prices follow Nilometer minima with a fixed ~9-month lag and asymmetric response — droughts move prices more than good floods. Falsify: joined series.

Before the 19-year cycle fossilized, Mesopotamian ad-hoc leap months cluster after poor harvests — the calendar as economic stimulus. Falsify: dated intercalations vs flood and price proxies.

Portable Roman dials cut for the wrong latitude reveal central workshops exporting blind; misfit errors should cluster by workshop signature. Falsify: latitudinal misfit clustering in the dial corpus.

Tooth-module standards should form a measurable transmission chain from Antikythera-era Greek gearing through the Byzantine sundial-calendar to Islamic geared astrolabes. Falsify: comparative tooth metrology.

City abandonment order follows storage-per-capita crossing a common threshold — a percolation collapse, not a uniform drought story. Falsify: LiDAR reservoir volumes vs terminal monument dates.

The canal network operated at self-organized criticality: repair and flood events in sediment should be power-law distributed, with the fatal event on the same distribution's tail. Falsify: sediment cores plus LiDAR.

Foggara abandonment should propagate radially outward from the depleting fossil aquifer's center in the exact sequence a drawdown model predicts. Falsify: settlement dates vs hydrogeological modeling.

Medieval strip scattering tracks the local yield covariance matrix (recoverable from modern soil data): more scattering where covariance is low across micro-zones, early consolidation where it's high. Falsify: field-system GIS vs soil covariance.

Watermill adoption follows a Bass curve whose innovation coefficient is set by monastic presence — monks as the p-parameter of medieval technology. Falsify: dated mill records by region.

Maya settlement rank-size should be Zipfian within unified polities and log-normal in fragmented eras — settlement statistics as a political-integration gauge. Falsify: LiDAR settlement hierarchies vs epigraphic political history.

Swahili coral-stone construction should show annual lime-mortar banding locked to the monsoon building season — architecture as a rainfall archive. Falsify: mortar micro-stratigraphy at Kilwa.

Nave RT60 and repertoire co-evolved: long-reverb churches correlate with slower, more melismatic chant and early organum. Falsify: acoustic measurement of Romanesque/Gothic naves vs local repertoire.

Norse assembly sites sit at open-air speech-intelligibility optima of their landscapes, beating matched control locations. Falsify: acoustic modeling of thing sites vs controls.

Muqarnas vaulting measurably evens the reverberant field for recitation compared to smooth domes of equal geometry — ornament with an acoustic function. Falsify: paired measurements in Iranian mosques.

The Porticus Minucia's 45 distribution bays implement a queueing solution: bay count × plausible service rate should match 200,000 monthly recipients with minimal waiting. Falsify: the arithmetic against the architecture.

Vomitoria design achieves evacuation times meeting modern stadium standards — safety engineering by iteration. Falsify: agent-based egress simulation on the actual plans.

Merer's logbook and quarry marks imply block deliveries arrived as a Poisson process modulated by Nile stage. Falsify: inter-arrival statistics in the Wadi al-Jarf papyri.