The potsherd substitution

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)

Ostraca — broken potsherds picked up for free — and papyrus competed at the bottom of the everyday writing market of Greco-Roman Egypt. Join them as substitute goods: the ostracon-to-papyrus ratio among short dated documents is a local price gauge, rising with distance from the papyrus-producing Delta and Fayum marshes and, within a single site, rising in decades when charta was dear. The marginal writer of a tax receipt trades convenience against material cost, so the substitution margin moves with freight and price like any commodity pair. If this holds, the famous ostraca-rich sites of Upper Egypt and the desert stations become facts of transport economics rather than of local scribal culture.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (carries the verdict): across mapped find-sites, the ostracon share of short dated documents in the most distant quartile from the papyrus-producing zones is at least 2x the share in the nearest quartile, controlling for document genre. Secondary clause: within the Theban corpus, the ostracon share rises in decades of attested high charta prices.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

papyri.info (in-house) for dated short documents by writing material and provenance, joined to the Scriptome normalized papyri place-mapping (in-house) for distances to papyrus-producing zones; the kill is a statistical test on non-codex documentary evidence.

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

Composed blind from the model's own knowledge in a zero-tool session and emitted directly as final text.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Ostraca as the free bottom-tier substitute for papyrus is a commonplace, and the substitution logic is implicit in the recycling literature, but the quantitative distance-decay test (ostracon share 2x higher in the far quartile from papyrus zones, moving with charta price) has not been run on place-mapped documents.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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