Capture-recapture for kings

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Ecologists estimate unseen animal populations by capture-recapture: tag what you catch, and count how often you catch it again. Javanese copper-plate charters permit the same trick on documents, because later courts re-issued and re-engraved older grants (the tinulad copies), so a single charter can be 'caught' twice — once as a surviving original and once inside a later copy — and the overlap between the two catches estimates how many charters were issued in total and how many perished. The mechanism is legal: sima freehold rights had to be reconfirmed and physically re-evidenced across reigns, so recopying sampled the working archive independently of what happened to survive into modern collections. This is a lost-but-inferable claim of the strictest kind: it measures the perished record without naming a single lost text. If it holds, pre-1500 Southeast Asia gets its first defensible documentary survival rate — a number where there has only been a lament.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Treating surviving originals and surviving later copies/confirmations of Javanese charters as two capture occasions, the capture-recapture estimate of the issued charter population will exceed the surviving population by at least a factor of five, i.e. an estimated survival rate below 20%. Primary clause: the point estimate of survival falls below 20%; the verdict follows it. Secondary clause: charters known only from later copies will constitute at least 20% of the known ninth- to tenth-century charter population.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The DHARMA project editions (machine-readable Sanskrit/vernacular inscriptions of South & Southeast Asia): the Javanese charter corpus with original-versus-copy status marked, supporting the two-occasion overlap computation.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind in a single Write by a fresh instance working only from the inline prompt, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Unseen-species/capture-recapture estimation of documentary loss is established for medieval European literature (Kestemont et al., Science 2022), so the method-to-loss join is anticipated; no application to Javanese copper-plate charters or the tinulad copy phenomenon located. Thin-field flag: Indonesian epigraphic literature is poorly web-indexed, but the quantitative join is almost certainly un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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