A scripture painted on pots

Claim (verbatim)

The Moche of Peru's north coast (c. 100-800 CE) left no script, but they left a narrative corpus with the statistical signature of one. Christopher Donnan's photographic archive of Moche art — built at UCLA from the late 1960s and now held at Dumbarton Oaks — and the catalogue in Donnan and McClelland's Moche Fineline Painting (1999) support his central, still-startling claim: thousands of painted vessels reduce to a small repertoire of canonical themes — the Sacrifice Ceremony, the Burial Theme, the Revolt of the Objects, ritual combat and ritual running — with fixed actors in fixed regalia. The canon was real enough to be enacted: the Sipán tombs excavated by Walter Alva from 1987, and the priestess burials at San José de Moro, interred people dressed as the very figures of the Sacrifice Ceremony — the narrative's cast confirmed in the ground. The mechanism: a fixed-cast, fixed-episode corpus reproduced by specialist painters across centuries and workshops is the visual member of an authoritative oral literature — a liturgy whose verbal member died with its priesthood — and canon-tightness is measurable as concentration, because authorized literatures cluster while free illustration disperses. McClelland's identification of individual painters' hands makes custody testable too: canon-keeping painters should each command several episodes of the repertoire, as copyists of a corpus do, rather than specializing one image apiece. Prediction: in the Donnan archive and the Donnan-McClelland catalogue, the ten most frequent identified themes will account for over 70% of narrative fineline vessels and singleton compositions for under 10%, and at least three individually identified painters will each be credited with three or more distinct canonical themes (primary clause: the top-ten-themes-over-70% concentration; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Christopher B. Donnan Moche Archive (Dumbarton Oaks) with Donnan and McClelland, Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and Its Artists (UCLA Fowler Museum, 1999).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Donnan archive and the Donnan-McClelland catalogue, the ten most frequent identified themes will account for over 70% of narrative fineline vessels and singleton compositions for under 10%, and at least three individually identified painters will each be credited with three or more distinct canonical themes (primary clause: the top-ten-themes-over-70% concentration; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Christopher B. Donnan Moche Archive (Dumbarton Oaks) with Donnan and McClelland, Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and Its Artists (UCLA Fowler Museum, 1999).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Donnan's central claim — that thousands of Moche fineline vessels reduce to a small canonical repertoire of fixed-cast themes, with the Sacrifice Ceremony confirmed archaeologically at Sipan and San Jose de Moro — is stated in Donnan and McClelland and in Donnan's thematic-approach work, and McClelland's identification of individual painters' hands is published. But the primary clause is a concentration statistic (top-ten themes over 70% of narrative vessels, singletons under 10%) plus a painter-repertoire count, computed over a large photographic archive that is not published as a countable dataset. That quantification, sensitive to how themes are individuated, has not been run; the canon claim is argued qualitatively, the concentration figure is the un-run test.

• Christopher B. Donnan and Donna McClelland, Moche Fineline Painting: Its Evolution and Its Artists (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1999)
• Christopher B. Donnan, Moche Art of Peru: Pre-Columbian Symbolic Communication (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.