One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins measurement theory (the error bar as a signal in its own right) to third-century political history: the width of the date range a modern editor can assign to a document is a thermometer of the dating formulas, regnal clarity, and bureaucratic…

Greenland lead deposition from Roman smelting is a proxy for silver output; predict lead flux co-moves with denarius fineness and leads Egyptian papyri price inflation by roughly a decade. Falsify: ice-core lead vs papyrological price series.

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.

Coin wear per year (calibrated on dated issues) measures circulation velocity; predict velocity spikes in crises as hoards dishoard. Falsify: 3D wear metrology on stratified site finds.

Roman brickyard outputs (CIL XV stamps) should show Pareto-distributed firm sizes and growth independent of size — modern firm dynamics in the ancient economy. Falsify: stamp counts per figlina over time.

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.

Pompeian wall dialogues should follow the same reply-depth distribution as modern forum threads — conversational universals across two millennia. Falsify: CIL IV thread reconstruction.

The map's segment errors should cluster by province, revealing the distinct source itineraries it was compiled from — stemmatics of a map. Falsify: error-variance clustering.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Greek and Roman astragalus throw scores are inversely proportional to empirically measured face probabilities — implicit odds-pricing two millennia before probability theory. Falsify: toss experiments vs attested scoring.

Roman die asymmetry clusters by workshop tradition, not period — craft transmission of unfairness. Falsify: 3D-scan corpora.

Joins eigenvector centrality to Roman jurisprudence: the Law of Citations of 426 CE, which privileged five jurists, mostly legislated what network centrality would compute from the jurists' own cross-citations, with Gaius as the deliberate, measurable exception smuggled in from the classroom.

Joins modern campaign geography (yard-sign and canvassing decay around a candidate's home) to Pompeian electoral epigraphy: painted programmata are spatial campaign artifacts, so endorsements should decay exponentially with walking distance from the candidate's own house, just as lawn signs do around a…

Price-ceiling economics meets Roman epigraphy: Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE worked exactly as shortage theory predicts — goods capped below prevailing market prices withdrew from recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market stayed visible, so the Edict's failure is…