The belts the minutes remember

Claim (verbatim)

Wampum diplomacy is the one lost-record problem in the Americas that comes with the other party's ledger attached. In Haudenosaunee and wider Woodlands practice, a belt of shell beads was a document: it validated each article of a council's business, was read back at renewals by keepers trained to it, and was archived at the council fire — the Onondaga keepership is the institution's name. Because European chanceries minuted everything, every belt passed at a recorded conference left an entry: the treaty minutes Benjamin Franklin printed between 1736 and 1762 (edited by Van Doren and Boyd, 1938), the New York colonial documents, and the Pennsylvania council records note belt after belt, string after string, often with sizes and designs. The production side of the archive is therefore countable — and survivorship is calamitous, by a double mechanism: belts were disassembled and their beads recirculated, wampum being fungible wealth as well as record, and the museum era then removed surviving belts from the keeperships that could read them, so even preserved objects lost their texts. New York State's 1898 designation as keeper of the Onondaga wampums and the return of twelve belts to Onondaga in 1989 bracket the century-long custody fight over what remained. The documented flow against the surviving stock yields the survival rate of a whole diplomatic archive — a figure almost no other American record genre permits. Prediction: counting belts and strings explicitly recorded as delivered in the Franklin-printed treaty minutes alone, 1736-1762, the documented instruments will exceed one hundred, while extant museum-catalogued belts attributable to those specific conferences number under ten — a documented-to-surviving ratio worse than ten to one inside a single well-bounded corpus (primary clause: the ten-to-one ratio on the Franklin treaty corpus; the verdict follows it). Kill: Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762 (ed. Van Doren and Boyd, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938) for the delivery ledger, against the NMAI collections database, the New York State Museum wampum records, and the 1989 Onondaga repatriation documentation; a unified extant-belt census is not yet built.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: counting belts and strings explicitly recorded as delivered in the Franklin-printed treaty minutes alone, 1736-1762, the documented instruments will exceed one hundred, while extant museum-catalogued belts attributable to those specific conferences number under ten — a documented-to-surviving ratio worse than ten to one inside a single well-bounded corpus (primary clause: the ten-to-one ratio on the Franklin treaty corpus; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762 (ed. Van Doren and Boyd, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938) for the delivery ledger, against the NMAI collections database, the New York State Museum wampum records, and the 1989 Onondaga repatriation documentation; a unified extant-belt census is not yet built.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The two sides of the ledger are published: the Franklin-printed treaty minutes (Van Doren and Boyd, 1938) record belt after belt and string after string with sizes and designs, and the custody history of surviving belts — the 1898 New York keepership and the 1989 Onondaga repatriation — is documented (Fenton). But the primary clause is a documented-to-surviving ratio, and the conjecture states 'a unified extant-belt census is not yet built'; neither the count of belts explicitly recorded delivered across 1736-1762 nor the tally of extant museum belts attributable to those specific conferences has been compiled to the ten-to-one threshold. The corpus is bounded and ready; the ratio is the un-run study.

• Julian P. Boyd and Carl Van Doren (eds.), Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938)
• William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.