The Layout That Didn't Survive

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)

The surviving Maya codices are laid out as tabular instruments — grids, columns, captioned pictures inside almanac frames — while Maya monumental texts run as continuous double-column discourse. Layout is genre made visible, so the near-total absence of continuous-discourse layout in the surviving books, set against its dominance in stone, is the survival filter's fingerprint measured in geometry rather than vocabulary — a second, independent gauge of what kind of books did not make it. The mechanism is the same two-stage filter as the vocabulary version: the books in priestly use at contact were working instruments, while narrative-historical books, which would have shared the monuments' discourse layout, belonged to the shelf that had already largely vanished. If the conjecture holds, the filter width gets a purely geometric measurement that requires no decipherment at all, and any future cave codex is predicted, at stated odds, to break the tabular monopoly.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Classify every page or register of the four Maya codices as tabular-instrument layout versus continuous-discourse layout, using purely visual criteria (grid structure, caption-image pairing, column run length). Primary clause (the verdict follows it): continuous-discourse layout occupies under 10 percent of total page area across all four codices, whereas a matched monument-text sample is majority continuous-discourse by text area. Near-parity in either corpus kills the conjecture.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

FAMSI codex facsimile corpus (primary), with a Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (CMHI, Peabody Museum) monument sample as the comparison baseline: the layout classification runs on the facsimile pages.

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

The tabular/almanac layout of surviving codices vs the continuous double-column discourse of monuments is standard descriptive contrast, but using page-area proportions of tabular vs continuous-discourse layout as a decipherment-free geometric gauge of survival-filter width (predicting future cave codices break the tabular monopoly) is an un-run operationalization.

'The Maya Codices', Annual Review of Anthropology (almanac/table structure)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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