A library bound in skin

Claim (verbatim)

In the Marquesas the fullest document a person produced was their own body: tattooing accumulated through life, zone by zone, motif by named motif, recording rank, deeds, alliances and ritual standing — a biographic notation carried by every fully marked elder. The population carrying this literature collapsed from tens of thousands at contact (estimates run from about 35,000 to over 80,000) to roughly two thousand by the 1920s, epidemic by epidemic, while the French administration and the mission suppressed the practice itself from the mid-nineteenth century. The notation was documented only after its carriers had nearly all died: Karl von den Steinen worked through survivors, museum pieces and the early engravings (Langsdorff's plates from 1804 among them) in 1897–98 for Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst (1925–28), and Willowdean Handy drew the tattoos of the last marked generation for the Bayard Dominick Expedition in 1920–21 (Tattooing in the Marquesas, Bishop Museum Bulletin 1, 1922). Two late, partly independent samples of a decimated motif population permit the standard unseen-species arithmetic: if the recorded inventories are small draws from a much larger dead corpus, their accumulation curves should sit far from saturation and each sample should hold motifs the other lacks — and the shortfall they jointly imply is a measured lower bound on how much of the notation died unrecorded. Prediction: coding von den Steinen's corpus as a motif-by-carrier incidence matrix (documented individuals and objects), a Chao-type lower-bound richness estimate will exceed the observed motif inventory by at least a factor of two, and Handy's independently collected 1920–21 corpus will contain named motifs absent from von den Steinen amounting to at least 15% of her own inventory (primary clause: the Chao-type bound at ≥2× observed richness; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): the motif-incidence matrix coded from the plates and motif registers of von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst (3 vols, Berlin, 1925–28), and Handy, Tattooing in the Marquesas (Bishop Museum Bulletin 1, 1922).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: coding von den Steinen's corpus as a motif-by-carrier incidence matrix (documented individuals and objects), a Chao-type lower-bound richness estimate will exceed the observed motif inventory by at least a factor of two, and Handy's independently collected 1920–21 corpus will contain named motifs absent from von den Steinen amounting to at least 15% of her own inventory (primary clause: the Chao-type bound at ≥2× observed richness; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): the motif-incidence matrix coded from the plates and motif registers of von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst (3 vols, Berlin, 1925–28), and Handy, Tattooing in the Marquesas (Bishop Museum Bulletin 1, 1922).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Von den Steinen's Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst (1925–28) and Handy's Tattooing in the Marquesas (1922) are the two standard motif corpora of a decimated tradition, and their comparison and the depopulation history are worked ground (Gell's Wrapping in Images, 1993, analyses the motif system). But the primary clause imports unseen-species estimation — a Chao-type lower bound at least twice observed richness on a motif-by-carrier incidence matrix — and neither that estimator nor the paired 15%-disjoint measurement between the two corpora was located as ever having been run; the kill is honestly flagged not-yet-built. Materials in print, the arithmetic un-run. Adjacent.

• Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, 3 vols (Berlin, 1925–28)
• Willowdean C. Handy, Tattooing in the Marquesas (Bishop Museum Bulletin 1, 1922)
• Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.