A literature twenty years wide

Claim (verbatim)

The epi-Olmec (Isthmian) script is read today — to whatever extent the Justeson-Kaufman decipherment (Science, 1993, extended 1997) is accepted — from a corpus whose entire long-text membership is two objects: La Mojarra Stela 1, pulled from the Acula River in 1986 with over four hundred glyphs and Long Count dates equivalent to 143 and 156 CE, and the Tuxtla Statuette, found in 1902, dated 162 CE. Houston and Coe could mount their published challenge to the decipherment for precisely this reason: the corpus is smaller than a page, so the system cannot be stress-tested on fresh text. But the corpus's shape is itself the historical finding. The Isthmian zone raised Long-Count-dated monuments from Chiapa de Corzo's 36 BCE — the earliest Long Count anywhere — and Tres Zapotes Stela C at 32 BCE to Cerro de las Mesas past 450 CE: five centuries of dated epigraphic practice. Within that span, every legible long text falls inside one nineteen-year window. The mechanism: this script's daily life ran on perishables in the hemisphere's bark-paper heartland, and long texts reached stone only during a brief monumental fashion at one or two centers — a single generation's ambition. What survives of a multi-century literature is the stone spillover of that generation, and any decipherment is hostage to its genre choices. Prediction: a full census of published Isthmian-script objects will show exactly two texts exceeding one hundred glyphs, both dated within a window of at most 25 years (143-162 CE), while Long-Count-dated monuments of the same zone span over 450 years — the legible long-text window under 6% of the region's attested epigraphic span — and at least a third of all claimed Isthmian inscriptions will be unprovenanced or effectively numeral-only (primary clause: the two-long-texts-within-25-years count against the 450-year span; the verdict follows it). Kill: the corpus as published in Justeson and Kaufman (Science 259, 1993, with the 1997 second-column study) and Houston and Coe's critique in Mexicon, with the regional monument documentation (Stirling's Cerro de las Mesas and Tres Zapotes reports; Pool's Tres Zapotes project); a unified Isthmian corpus database is not yet built.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a full census of published Isthmian-script objects will show exactly two texts exceeding one hundred glyphs, both dated within a window of at most 25 years (143-162 CE), while Long-Count-dated monuments of the same zone span over 450 years — the legible long-text window under 6% of the region's attested epigraphic span — and at least a third of all claimed Isthmian inscriptions will be unprovenanced or effectively numeral-only (primary clause: the two-long-texts-within-25-years count against the 450-year span; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the corpus as published in Justeson and Kaufman (Science 259, 1993, with the 1997 second-column study) and Houston and Coe's critique in Mexicon, with the regional monument documentation (Stirling's Cerro de las Mesas and Tres Zapotes reports; Pool's Tres Zapotes project); a unified Isthmian corpus database is not yet built.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause restates the field's most famous corpus fact: the only two long Isthmian (epi-Olmec) texts are La Mojarra Stela 1 (Long Count dates 143 and 156 CE) and the Tuxtla Statuette (162 CE), inside a two-decade window, while the region's Long-Count monument tradition runs from the late first century BCE past 450 CE. This is stated outright in Justeson and Kaufman's decipherment and is the express premise of Houston and Coe's critique that the corpus is too small to stress-test. A reader of that literature already knows the two-texts-within-twenty-five-years-against-a-450-year-span answer; the census merely re-counts what is published.

• John S. Justeson and Terrence Kaufman, 'A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing,' Science 259 (1993)
• Stephen Houston and Michael Coe, 'Has Isthmian Writing Been Deciphered?', Mexicon 25 (2003)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.