Yard signs of Pompeii

Status: Prior

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)

Yard signs of Pompeii. Joins modern campaign geography (yard-sign and canvassing decay around a candidate's home) to Pompeian electoral epigraphy: painted programmata are spatial campaign artifacts, so endorsements should decay exponentially with walking distance from the candidate's own house, just as lawn signs do around a modern candidate's block.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For the candidates of the final Pompeian campaigns whose residences are securely identified, programmata density per 100 m of street frontage declines with network walking distance from the candidate's house with an exponential scale of 150-400 m; each candidate's share of all programmata within 100 m of his own house exceeds his citywide share by at least 2x; and named endorsers (rogatores) with identifiable premises cluster on the candidate's home street more than on comparable control streets.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: geolocated programmata corpora built from CIL IV with mapped house attributions. A spatially flat distribution, or home-neighborhood shares matching citywide shares, kills it.

Provenance

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

Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.

Novelty / leakage triage

Leaked (already exists in the literature)

The same analytical move is published: the Viitanen-associated GIS programme maps ~1,500 accurately located programmata, finds clustering near candidates' own residences and at loci celeberrimi, and explicitly tests rogator-residence-versus-placement (385 placed notices with rogator data). The exponential decay-scale fit and the 2x-within-100m ratio were not located, but the connection is an active published program.

Viitanen et al., 'Campaigning For Votes in Ancient Pompeii - Contextualizing Electoral Programmata' — The GIS residence-vs-placement program

Predictions

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