Thirty-nine reigns cut in coral

Claim (verbatim)

The Tuʻi Tonga dynasty kept its history as recitation: a line of thirty-nine titleholders from ʻAhoʻeitu down to Laufilitonga (d. 1865), fixed on paper only when Gifford printed the genealogies gathered by the Bayard Dominick fieldwork (Tongan Society, Bishop Museum Bulletin 61, 1929) and when Queen Sālote worked through the royal traditions with Elizabeth Bott (Polynesian Society, 1982). The same tradition binds named kings to datable stone: Tuʻitātui, eleventh in the line, is credited with the Haʻamonga ʻa Maui trilithon, and Teleʻa, near the end of the line's paramountcy, with the finest of the monumental langi tombs at Lapaha. Since the ANU excavation programme led by Geoffrey Clark put absolute dates on the Lapaha tombs, the memorized king list has become checkable as almost no purely oral chronology on earth is: if genealogical recitation preserved real sequence across half a millennium, list order and masonry dates must agree; if the list is legend arranged as pedigree, the attributions should scatter against the stones. The stakes are regional — Tonga is the calibration case for every Oceanian polity whose equivalent recitations were never written down, an accuracy measurement on the one archive of this class that can still be scored. Prediction: ordering every Lapaha-area monument that carries a traditional builder attribution in Gifford or Bott by that builder's position in the Tuʻi Tonga list, the published radiocarbon and uranium-series determinations will preserve the order (Spearman rank correlation ≥0.8 across at least five monuments), and for the two anchor attributions — Tuʻitātui's trilithon and Teleʻa's paepae — the dated construction windows will fall within ±75 years of the reign windows implied by 18–25-year average tenures counted back from Laufilitonga (primary clause: the ≥0.8 rank concordance; the verdict follows it). Kill: the genealogies in Gifford, Tongan Society (Bishop Museum Bulletin 61, 1929) and Bott, Tongan Society at the Time of Captain Cook's Visits (Polynesian Society, 1982), scored against the dating series published from Geoffrey Clark's Lapaha excavation programme (Clark, Burley and Murray, Antiquity 82, 2008, with the subsequent ANU Lapaha dating papers).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: ordering every Lapaha-area monument that carries a traditional builder attribution in Gifford or Bott by that builder's position in the Tuʻi Tonga list, the published radiocarbon and uranium-series determinations will preserve the order (Spearman rank correlation ≥0.8 across at least five monuments), and for the two anchor attributions — Tuʻitātui's trilithon and Teleʻa's paepae — the dated construction windows will fall within ±75 years of the reign windows implied by 18–25-year average tenures counted back from Laufilitonga (primary clause: the ≥0.8 rank concordance; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the genealogies in Gifford, Tongan Society (Bishop Museum Bulletin 61, 1929) and Bott, Tongan Society at the Time of Captain Cook's Visits (Polynesian Society, 1982), scored against the dating series published from Geoffrey Clark's Lapaha excavation programme (Clark, Burley and Murray, Antiquity 82, 2008, with the subsequent ANU Lapaha dating papers).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The Tuʻi Tonga king-list (Gifford, 1929; Bott, 1982) and the absolute dating of the Lapaha langi from Geoffrey Clark's ANU programme (Clark, Burley & Murray, Antiquity 82, 2008) are both published, and the qualitative question of whether monumental construction tracks the genealogical sequence has been discussed within that programme. But the specific test — a Spearman rank concordance of at least 0.8 between builder position and dated construction across five or more attributed monuments, with the Haʻamonga trilithon and Teleʻa's paepae anchored to plus-or-minus 75-year reign windows — was not located as ever having been computed. The dating exists and the king list exists; the ordering statistic is un-run. Adjacent.

• E. W. Gifford, Tongan Society (Bishop Museum Bulletin 61, 1929)
• Geoffrey Clark, David Burley & Tim Murray, 'Monumentality and the development of the Tongan maritime chiefdom', Antiquity 82 (2008)
• Elizabeth Bott, Tongan Society at the Time of Captain Cook's Visits (Polynesian Society, 1982)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.