The hidden shelf discloses itself

Claim (verbatim)

The Popol Vuh survives because a Dominican curate at Chichicastenango, Francisco Ximénez, borrowed and copied a K'iche' manuscript around 1701-03; the original was never seen again, and Ximénez's copy traveled a chain nobody designed — convent shelf, the Universidad de San Carlos library after the 1829 expulsion of the friars, Carl Scherzer's notice in 1854, Brasseur de Bourbourg's removal of the volume to Europe, the Pinart sale, Edward Ayer's purchase, and rest at the Newberry Library as Ayer MS 1515. The standard moral is single-thread fragility. The sharper structural fact is what the sibling corpus shows: this literature's true archive was never a colonial library but the community chest. The Título de Totonicapán, written in 1554, was produced by its town for translation in 1834, dropped from scholarly view, and was located again by Robert Carmack in 1973 — still in Totonicapán, still in community custody, four centuries after composition. The Rabinal Achí reached paper in the 1850s only because the town's tradition-keeper dictated it. The corpus catalogued in Carmack's Quichean Civilization is therefore not a closed survival set but a disclosure process: documents enter scholarship when a community elects to show them, and the discovery curve never flattened — which implies undisclosed highland shelves remain. What we call the corpus is the visible edge of a custody regime still in operation. Prediction: dating each major highland-Guatemalan indigenous-language colonial document's first entry into scholarly knowledge, at least one third of the corpus in Carmack's census will have entered only after 1900, with at least three substantial texts surfacing after 1950, the Totonicapán original among them (primary clause: the one-third-after-1900 share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the document-by-document source census in Robert M. Carmack, Quichean Civilization (University of California Press, 1973), updated by the Carmack-Mondloch facsimile edition of the Título de Totonicapán (UNAM, 1983) and the Newberry Library records for Ayer MS 1515.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: dating each major highland-Guatemalan indigenous-language colonial document's first entry into scholarly knowledge, at least one third of the corpus in Carmack's census will have entered only after 1900, with at least three substantial texts surfacing after 1950, the Totonicapán original among them (primary clause: the one-third-after-1900 share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the document-by-document source census in Robert M. Carmack, Quichean Civilization (University of California Press, 1973), updated by the Carmack-Mondloch facsimile edition of the Título de Totonicapán (UNAM, 1983) and the Newberry Library records for Ayer MS 1515.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Carmack's Quichean Civilization is exactly the document-by-document source census the kill names, and the individual late-disclosure facts are in it — the Titulo de Totonicapan relocated by Carmack in 1973 and still in community custody, the Rabinal Achi reaching paper only in the 1850s, the Popol Vuh's single-thread survival to Ayer MS 1515. But the primary clause is an aggregate: dating every major highland-Guatemalan document's first entry into scholarship and showing at least a third arrived after 1900 with at least three surfacing after 1950. That disclosure-date share has not been computed over the census; the raw histories are printed, the arithmetic is un-run.

• Robert M. Carmack, Quichean Civilization: The Ethnohistoric, Ethnographic, and Archaeological Sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)
• Robert M. Carmack and James L. Mondloch, El Titulo de Totonicapan (Mexico: UNAM, 1983)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.