The books in the tombs are plaster

Claim (verbatim)

Classic Maya courts made books seven centuries before the oldest surviving Maya codex was painted, and the proof is double: excavated and depicted. Excavated: elite tombs at Uaxactún, Altun Ha, and Copán, among other sites, have yielded the remains of screenfold codices — coherent masses of painted stucco flakes whose organic pages rotted away — physically present, recorded in the site reports, and so far unreadable by any published technique; Coe and Kerr's The Art of the Maya Scribe collects the cases. Depicted: the rollout photographs of the Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database show court scribes at work with screenfold books in jaguar-pelt covers, ink pots, and brush pens; the monkey-scribe gods and Pawahtun teachers made the book a fixture of courtly imagery, and the 'codex-style' vases of the Mirador region painted their scenes in the very line-work of book illumination. The mechanism: ceramics entered tombs and survive by the thousand, books entered tombs and survive as plaster — so the vase corpus functions as the census instrument of a Classic book culture whose physical members are a handful of illegible lumps. And on the vases the book already wears the screenfold format with jaguar-skin binding that the four Postclassic survivors still wear centuries later: a genre continuity measurable in pictures across seven hundred years of lost shelves. Prediction: the Kerr database will yield at least 25 distinct vessels depicting codices or scribal kit in use, with at least 90% of the depicted books in screenfold format matching the surviving codices, while the published count of excavated Classic-period codex remains stands at four tombs or more with zero legible pages recovered (primary clause: the 25-vessel, 90%-screenfold census; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database (mayavase.com) rollout corpus, with Michael Coe and Justin Kerr, The Art of the Maya Scribe (1997), and the Uaxactún, Altun Ha, and Copán excavation reports for the tomb codices.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: the Kerr database will yield at least 25 distinct vessels depicting codices or scribal kit in use, with at least 90% of the depicted books in screenfold format matching the surviving codices, while the published count of excavated Classic-period codex remains stands at four tombs or more with zero legible pages recovered (primary clause: the 25-vessel, 90%-screenfold census; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database (mayavase.com) rollout corpus, with Michael Coe and Justin Kerr, The Art of the Maya Scribe (1997), and the Uaxactún, Altun Ha, and Copán excavation reports for the tomb codices.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Coe and Kerr's The Art of the Maya Scribe assembles the scribal and codex imagery of the vase corpus and the excavated Classic-period stucco codex remains (Uaxactun, Altun Ha, Copan and others), so the phenomena the conjecture rests on — court scribes with screenfold books on the vases, illegible codex lumps in the tombs — are described and the illegibility of the excavated remains is established. What is un-run is the specific census the primary clause names: at least twenty-five distinct Kerr vessels depicting codices or scribal kit with at least 90% in screenfold format. That tally over the rollout database has not been compiled to those thresholds; the neighborhood is worked, the count is not.

• Michael D. Coe and Justin Kerr, The Art of the Maya Scribe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997)
• The Justin Kerr Maya Vase Database (rollout photograph corpus, mayavase.com)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.