One Thousand and One Conjectures

Copies per text follow preferential attachment: power-law copy counts, with survival size-biased so bestsellers over-survive superlinearly. Falsify: medieval library catalogs vs extant counts.

Parchment was a livestock derivative, so manuscript production absorbed herd shocks: colophon-dated production series in NW Europe should dip with a 1–3 year lag after documented cattle murrains, with no equivalent dip in paper-based production once paper is available as a control.

The mutually derivable columns of Easter tables (golden number, epact, dominical letter, indiction) form a redundant error-correcting code that medieval users actually exercised.

Scribal error-apology formulae (“forgive the faults of the unworthy scribe”) are costly quality signals from careful scribes, not confessions from sloppy ones.

Manuscripts became binding waste on an institutional obsolescence clock, not a material wear-out clock.

Monastic copying was counter-cyclical to farm labor; professional urban copying was not — so the seasonality amplitude of dated colophons is a quantitative urbanization index of book production.

Production mode (visual exemplar copying vs dictation/pecia mass production) is recoverable from error typology alone.

Viking hack-silver should follow the universal power-law mass distribution of brittle fragmentation; deviations mark the arrival of weighed-payment standards. Falsify: fragment masses in Cuerdale and Spillings hoards.

Hoard deposition is antiquity's VIX: deposition rates should lead invasions in narrative sources by months (people bury on rumor), and non-recovery rates should scale with conflict mortality. Falsify: dated hoard databases vs chronicle chronology.

Debasement is tolerated until a critical fineness, then old-coin hoarding jumps discontinuously — and the threshold should be roughly the same in 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France. Falsify: old/new coin ratios in hoards vs fineness series.

The latitudes engraved on surviving astrolabe plates should follow the population distribution of customer cities — medieval product-line economics. Falsify: plate-latitude inventories vs city-size estimates.

Relic translations should cluster in the five years before major building fundraising — acquisitions as anchor investments. Falsify: translation dates vs cathedral fabric accounts.

Shrine market shares (Thames badge finds) follow Polya-urn path dependence: early leads persist beyond what miracle registers justify. Falsify: badge chronology vs miracle-count records.

As Greenland ivory prices fell against elephant ivory, Norse hunters intensified into riskier, more distant grounds — income-target behavior, not profit maximization. Falsify: the existing ivory isotope sequence against price series; profit-maximizers would have quit, not pushed north.

Provenance distance-decay exponents should scale with value density: Mayen lava millstones should decay steeper than fine pottery by precisely the ratio of transport cost to unit value. Falsify: sourced distribution maps.

English market charters before the 13th-century spacing statute should already show the statutory spacing — law codifying a self-organized equilibrium, not creating one. Falsify: charter geodata pre- and post-statute.

Staff notation cut chant copying errors discontinuously: predict per-neume Levenshtein error drops by half across the Guidonian transition within single traditions. Falsify: aligned chant stemmas.

Within a scriptorium, per-copy error rates are constant enough to date manuscripts by error accumulation, like a decay clock. Falsify: error counts vs colophon-dated families.

Oral-epic formulas are redundancy bits: formula density should rise with local information load (names, numbers, catalogs) within Homeric and South Slavic lines. Falsify: corpus regression.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mark distributions across coursework reconstruct shift schedules: batch sizes should be Poisson and gangs should alternate by course. Falsify: mark spatial statistics at documented cathedrals.

Trace-element signatures in blue stained glass should shift with documented disruptions of Asian trade routes — windows as sensors of Eurasian politics. Falsify: dated glass panels vs route-history chronology.

Joins stream-power hydrology to the fiscal cadastre: the 1086 Domesday survey unwittingly recorded a physics meter, because a mill's render capitalized the hydraulic power of its site; feudal rent should therefore scale with drainage-area-times-slope like an engineering formula.

Joins process-engineering labor accounting to Viking naval history: the binding constraint on Norse sea power was textile throughput, not shipwrights; a large woolen sail embodied more person-hours than the hull it drove, so fleets could grow only as fast as spinning capacity.

Joins the cognitive psychology of recall (the serial-position curve: primacy and recency beat the middle) to the stemmatics of oral law: Icelandic law was recited from memory in fixed thirds over three years, so when it was finally written down, the middle…

The cutting-stock problem of operations research meets codicology: parchment page sizes are not aesthetic free choices but near-optimal cuts of animal skins, so leaf dimensions quantize at dyadic folds of regional skin rectangles, while paper leaves, cut from standard moulds, cluster at…

Vertical-monopoly pricing from industrial organization meets the toll castles of the Holy Roman Empire: a chain of independent tolls on one river overcharges relative to a single owner, so consolidation of adjacent tolls under one prince should cut the combined rate and…

Packet-switched content distribution meets the medieval university book trade: the pecia system chunked exemplars into pieces copied in parallel and reassembled, so stemmatic affiliation should switch at known pecia boundaries — an error signature that continuous-exemplar copying cannot produce.

Common-value auction theory meets Venetian state finance: the incanti — annual auctions of state galley charters — were common-value auctions in which patrician bidders demonstrably learned to shade bids across 150 years, the earliest documented winner's-curse correction.