The year the stars fell in every count

Claim (verbatim)

The Lakota winter count (waniyetu wowapi) is an annalistic genre caught in working order: a keeper chose one event to name each year, painted its pictograph on hide — later muslin or paper — and used the sequence as the index to a communal oral chronicle; counts were recopied as they wore out and passed across keeper generations. What survives — the Smithsonian's set published in Greene and Thornton's The Year the Stars Fell (2007), the counts in Garrick Mallery's Bureau of Ethnology reports of 1886 and 1893 — is the fraction of a Plains-wide genre (Lakota, Kiowa, Blackfeet, Mandan) that happened to intersect the 1880-1910 collecting window; band-level record-keeping implies dozens of contemporaneous registers where we hold a handful. The genre's annalistic character is testable from within, because independent local annals carry a signature that neither calendars nor art share: they agree on communal-scale public events and diverge on everything else. The Leonid meteor storm of November 1833 — 'the year the stars fell' — is the great natural synchronizer, and it should sit in essentially every count that spans it, while ordinary years record each band's own dead, fights, epidemics, and horses. A genre that shows exactly that profile is a distributed annals system, and the survivors then stand as samples of a lost archive of band histories, not as isolated curios. Prediction: across the published Lakota counts spanning 1833-34, at least 90% will record the meteor storm as that year's pictograph, while the median pairwise same-year agreement for other years falls below 50% — high-consensus anchors over a low-consensus local fabric, the fingerprint of independent annals drawing on shared public experience (primary clause: the 90%-versus-under-50% contrast; the verdict follows it). Kill: Candace Greene and Russell Thornton, eds., The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (Nebraska, 2007) and the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives winter-counts online resource, with Mallery's 1886 and 1893 Bureau of Ethnology reports as control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: across the published Lakota counts spanning 1833-34, at least 90% will record the meteor storm as that year's pictograph, while the median pairwise same-year agreement for other years falls below 50% — high-consensus anchors over a low-consensus local fabric, the fingerprint of independent annals drawing on shared public experience (primary clause: the 90%-versus-under-50% contrast; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Candace Greene and Russell Thornton, eds., The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (Nebraska, 2007) and the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives winter-counts online resource, with Mallery's 1886 and 1893 Bureau of Ethnology reports as control.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That the 1833-34 Leonid storm ('the year the stars fell') sits in essentially every Plains winter count that spans it is a textbook near-universal, stated by Greene and Thornton and Mallery and giving the Smithsonian volume its title, so the 90% half of the primary clause is close to guaranteed. But the clause is a paired contrast, and its second half — that the median pairwise same-year agreement for ordinary years falls below 50% — has not been computed; Greene and Thornton supply the synoptic data and note that counts diverge on local events without running the corpus-wide pairwise agreement to a median. The quantitative contrast as posed is the un-run test.

• Candace S. Greene and Russell Thornton (eds.), The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Smithsonian Institution, 2007)
• Garrick Mallery, 'Picture-Writing of the American Indians,' Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1893)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.