The coastline confederacy

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)

Campā is conventionally narrated as a kingdom with a sequence of capitals moving down the Vietnamese coast. Join its epigraphy to settlement science's rank-size rule: in a centralized state the leading centre dominates document production (a 'primate' distribution), while a confederation of peers spreads production flat. The conjecture is that the spatial distribution of Cham inscriptions across river-valley clusters is statistically flat — no cluster ever monopolizing — and stays flat in every period band, revealing Campā as a persistent multi-polar mandala of valley polities rather than a unitary kingdom with a wandering capital. The mechanism is patronage gravity: inscriptions follow endowment, and endowment follows real political weight, so the stones vote on the constitution. If it holds, a long-standing historiographic picture breaks quantitatively, and each valley's epigraphic share becomes a time-series of confederate power that no chronicle records.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Rank-size analysis of Cham inscription counts by site cluster will yield a distribution significantly flatter than primate in every period band — the top cluster holding under 25% of the band's corpus and a Zipf-type exponent below 0.8 — with the identity of the leading cluster changing at least twice across the corpus's full span. Primary clause: the sub-primate flatness in every period band; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā (Cham inscriptions, C-numbers): site-cluster counts and rank-size statistics per period band.

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

The substantive thesis — Campa as a multi-polar mandala/heterarchy of river-valley polities rather than a unitary kingdom — is firmly published (Vickery's 'Champa revised'; Southworth's archipelagic river-valley model), so the direction is strongly anticipated; but the rank-size/Zipf operationalization over inscription counts per site cluster and period band is un-run. Flagged: this one is anticipation-heavy, adjacency by prior qualitative consensus.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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