Count the missing by their overlaps

Claim (verbatim)

The Mixtec historical codices — Zouche-Nuttall, Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, Bodley, Selden, Colombino-Becker — are genealogical registers of named persons from named polities, and they cross-attest one another: the biography of Lord 8 Deer Jaguar Claw runs through several of them independently. Burgoa still saw such books in seventeenth-century Oaxaca and describes their destruction. Cross-attestation makes the survivors a mark-recapture sample of the original library of dynastic registers: the rate at which the same persons recur across independent codices estimates how much genealogical record once existed. Alfonso Caso's posthumous Reyes y reinos de la Mixteca compiled exactly the instrument needed — a biographical dictionary of every named person in the codices, attestation by attestation. If most persons prove to be singletons, the surviving books are a thin skim of a large genealogical literature; if the same cast recurs everywhere, the library was always small. Prediction: in Caso's biographical dictionary, at least 60% of distinct named persons will be attested in exactly one codex, and a Lincoln-Petersen or Chao estimate treating each codex as an independent capture of the dynastic-person population will bound the original population at no less than three times the recorded one — implying, at roughly constant persons per book, an original Mixtec genealogical library of at least fifteen volumes of the surviving class (primary clause: the 60% singleton share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the person-by-person attestation index in Alfonso Caso, Reyes y reinos de la Mixteca (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1977-79), with Jansen and Perez Jimenez's codex commentaries as identification controls; the computation is a capture-recapture estimate over the index.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in Caso's biographical dictionary, at least 60% of distinct named persons will be attested in exactly one codex, and a Lincoln-Petersen or Chao estimate treating each codex as an independent capture of the dynastic-person population will bound the original population at no less than three times the recorded one — implying, at roughly constant persons per book, an original Mixtec genealogical library of at least fifteen volumes of the surviving class (primary clause: the 60% singleton share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the person-by-person attestation index in Alfonso Caso, Reyes y reinos de la Mixteca (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1977-79), with Jansen and Perez Jimenez's codex commentaries as identification controls; the computation is a capture-recapture estimate over the index.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The destruction testimony (Burgoa) and the cross-codex attestation of persons such as Lord 8 Deer are foundations of the field, and Caso built exactly the person-by-person index the test needs; but no singleton-share count or capture-recapture estimate of the original codex population was located — the mark-recapture framing appears unapplied to Mixtec codices.

• A. Caso, Reyes y reinos de la Mixteca, 2 vols (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1977-79)
• M. Jansen & G.A. Perez Jimenez, Encounter with the Plumed Serpent: Drama and Power in the Heart of Mesoamerica (University Press of Colorado, 2007)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.