A Census of Signatures

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)

Classic Maya artists sometimes signed their work — signature phrases occur on carved monuments and painted vessels — and a signing culture accidentally runs a census of its own workforce: capture-recapture on named artists across signed objects estimates the population of scribes and sculptors per city per generation, most of whose output is lost. The mechanism of the estimate is the ratio of once-attested to multiply-attested names, exactly as in any tagging study; the mechanism of the history is that signature was a prestige practice among precisely the specialists who also produced books. Chained to plausible working-life output rates, the scribe census yields a production rate for texts on perishable media — a model of the destroyed book population built from labor supply rather than from the pitiful surviving sample. If the conjecture holds, questions like how many text-producing artists a major court employed become answerable with confidence intervals, anchoring the scale of the record that burned or rotted.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Collect all artist-signature name phrases with site and period assignments. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): singleton names outnumber multiply-attested names by at least 3 to 1, yielding a Chao1 estimate of the signing-artist population at least 4 times the attested name count. Secondary clause: estimated artist populations correlate positively across sites with monument-corpus size (rank correlation, p < 0.05), as a labor-supply model requires.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): artist-signature phrases with site and period tags supply the capture-recapture data.

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 artist/scribe signing is documented and corpora of named artists exist (Houston: ~120 sculptors, 17 painters; 'Broken Fingers' scribe-capture studies), and capture-recapture is standard elsewhere, but formally running Chao1/capture-recapture on the signed-artist name corpus to estimate the scribe population per court/generation is un-run. Thin field.

'Broken fingers: Classic Maya scribe capture and polity consolidation', Antiquity
Kajetan Jagodzinski, 'Role of an Artist... Preserved Signatures of Scribes and Sculptors', academia.edu 42689266

Predictions

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