One Thousand and One Conjectures

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.

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.

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.

Ur III beer-and-barley rations show nominal rigidity: unchanged through price shocks, with adjustment hidden in quality. Falsify: ration quantities vs barley price proxies across archives.

Mesopotamian debt-cancellation edicts should leave a physical signature — smashed or discarded loan tablets clustering at royal accession years. Falsify: tablet discard contexts vs king lists.

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.

Babylonian temple lending should expand exactly when private-house lending contracts — lender-of-last-resort behavior in the Old Babylonian credit market. Falsify: dated loan tablets sorted by lender type.

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.

Joins index-number theory (chained consumer-price-index construction) to Tamil temple epigraphy: thousands of dated endowment inscriptions quoting paddy, ghee, and oil rates for perpetual lamps constitute a computable medieval price index, and Chola war finance should be visible in it as inflation episodes.

Joins the economics of luxury counterfeiting to Japanese sword connoisseurship: forged signatures (gimei) on blades are counterfeit branding, so the forgery rate should rise steeply with the smith's brand equity, exactly as fake rates concentrate in the top handbag brands today.

Joins actuarial insurance pricing to maritime archaeology: fourth-century BCE Athenian bottomry rates were risk-priced to break even, so the loss probability implied by loan spreads must match the wreck rate implied by the archaeological record, two completely independent instruments reading the same…

Friedman's plucking model of business cycles meets documentary papyrology: aggregate documentary output runs along an administrative-capacity ceiling from which crises pluck it downward, so the depth of a collapse predicts the speed of the subsequent recovery, while the size of a boom…

The term structure of interest rates meets Old Assyrian merchant finance: Kanesh-trade interest was customary rather than market-clearing, so the yield curve is flat — annualized rates independent of maturity — while risk was priced instead in default-penalty clauses that do scale…

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…

Absenteeism econometrics meets the pharaoh's tomb-builders: the royal workmen treated the Egyptian ten-day week exactly as modern workforces treat Fridays — absence hazard spikes on workdays adjacent to rest days, manufacturing long weekends, and a small cadre of chronic absentees carries most…

Proof-of-work monetary theory meets Yapese stone money: rai stones were a difficulty-priced currency — value superlinear in size because quarrying-and-transport work scales faster than diameter — plus a verifiable-history premium for provenance stories, and an instant discount when cheap Western shipping broke…

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.