Chao's Bound on the Priests' Bookshelf

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)

Species-richness estimators of the Chao family infer how many species were never observed from the ratio of once-seen to twice-seen types, and the surviving Maya codices permit exactly this move: treat each self-contained almanac or table unit as a type, and each codex as a sampling event drawn from a shared, mostly destroyed divinatory literature. Almanac types appearing in only one codex, weighed against types recurring across codices, give a statistical lower bound on the number of distinct instrument types the lost genre contained. The mechanism is historical and mundane: priests compiled working books by copying instruments from a circulating repertoire, which is sampling with replacement from a genre pool, the precise situation richness estimators were built for. If the conjecture holds, the four codices stop being isolated relics and become a usable statistical sample, and the question of how much divinatory literature was destroyed acquires a defensible numerical lower bound.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Catalog the distinct almanac and table units across the surviving Maya codices from the facsimiles, scoring two units as the same type when they share instrument structure (calendrical frame, station count, subject frame). Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the Chao2 lower bound on the total number of distinct types in the source population is at least 3 times the attested type count. Secondary clause: singleton types (attested in exactly one codex) outnumber doubleton types by at least 2 to 1, the regime in which the estimator signals severe undersampling.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

FAMSI codex facsimile corpus: the facsimiles of the four Maya codices supply the almanac and table-unit inventory on which the richness estimate is computed.

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

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Provenance

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

Generated in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Applying Chao/unseen-species estimators to estimate destroyed Maya literature is the explicit theme of recent work ('The Lost Libraries: An Archaeology of Maya Books' 2025; arXiv 2505.19246), but treating each almanac/table unit as a 'type' and the four codices as sampling events to compute a Chao2 lower bound on lost instrument types is a specific un-run operationalization. Thin field.

'15 The Lost Libraries: An Archaeology of Maya Books' (2025), ResearchGate 398195289
Kestemont & Karsdorp unseen-species / Chao1 for cultural survival, Science 2022

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