The Sixty-Year Cliff

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)

Maya monuments routinely record events that happened long before the stone was dedicated, and the distribution of that retrospection gap is a probe of what sculptors' patrons could actually consult. Oral memory has a well-documented horizon of roughly two to three generations; written archives have no such horizon. The conjecture: retrospection gaps in the dated corpus are bimodal — a dense mode inside the living-memory window and a separate archival tail running centuries deep toward dynastic founders — with a measurable trough between them marking the point where courts switched from witnesses to documents. The mechanism is evidentiary economics: within living memory you cite elders; beyond it you cite books, and only events that made it into books remain citable at all, thinning the record precisely at the oral horizon. If the conjecture holds, the lost dynastic archives become visible as a statistical shelf: precisely dated events too old for any witness, sourced from documents that are now ash.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Compute dedication-date minus event-date for all securely read retrospective event records, with a sensitivity variant excluding mythological deep-time dates. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the gap distribution is significantly bimodal with an antimode between roughly 50 and 90 years (p < 0.05 against unimodal fits). Secondary clause: deep-tail events (gap over 150 years) concentrate at large, long-lived sites, where archives would plausibly have accumulated.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): dated event and dedication records supply the retrospection-gap distribution.

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 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

Maya retrospective dating, the reworking/rewriting of dynastic history, and oral-vs-archival memory horizons are all treated in the memory-work literature (Gillespie), but the specific prediction of a bimodal retrospection-gap distribution with an antimode at the ~50-90-year oral horizon marking a witness-to-document switch is un-run.

Susan D. Gillespie, 'Maya Memory Work', Ancient Mesoamerica

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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