The hand that writes, paints

Claim (verbatim)

The hand that writes, paints. Whether Maya codex production divided glyphic and pictorial labour is unresolved. The conjecture: it did not — each glyphically identified scribal hand painted its own deity images, so a hand's iconographic micro-habits (the drawing of God B's eye, ear-ornament forms, foot rendering) covary with its glyphic habits. If so, clustering pages by image attributes alone must recover the hand divisions established independently from the glyphs; if image clusters cut cleanly across glyphic hands, specialist painters existed and the conjecture dies.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (the verdict follows it): coding at least 12 iconographic micro-attributes across deity images in the Dresden and Madrid codices, unsupervised clustering reproduces the accepted glyph-based hand divisions with at least 75 percent page-assignment agreement, judged against a permutation baseline. The direction of failure is informative either way, but the verdict follows the 75 percent threshold.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: SLUB Dresden's complete open digitization of the Dresden Codex and the digitized Codex Madrid facsimile via the Museo de América and FAMSI.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

Whether Maya codex production split glyphic and pictorial labour is an explicitly open question anchored on established evidence: the Dresden and Madrid codices were each written by several distinct scribal hands (c. eight or nine), identified from glyphic style, and the same skilled craftsmen are described as painting both pictures and glyphs -- so the hand-division framework the item's test relies on, and the labour-division question it answers, are documented. Not located: the item's decidable test -- that coding >= 12 iconographic micro-attributes of deity images and clustering them unsupervised reproduces the accepted GLYPH-based hand divisions at >= 75 percent page-assignment agreement (against a permutation baseline), which would show each scribal hand painted its own images. Question posed and hand-divisions established; the image-attribute-vs-glyph-hand covariance clustering is unrun.

• Wikipedia, 'Dresden Codex' and 'Madrid Codex (Maya)' (several distinct scribal hands identified from glyphs; craftsmen painting pictures and glyphs) — c. eight scribal hands and the open glyph/image division-of-labour question that the covariance test would resolve.
• SLUB Dresden Dresden Codex digitization and the Codex Madrid facsimile (Museo de America; FAMSI) — The kill dataset for clustering deity images by micro-attributes against the glyph-based hand divisions.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.