Ice-core money supply

Claim (verbatim)

Ice-core money supply. Greenland's ice sheet and Roman monetary history are usually studied by different disciplines, yet the first quietly records the second: lead deposition in Greenland ice cores derives largely from the atmospheric fallout of Roman smelting, and because silver was refined from lead-rich ores by cupellation, the lead flux is a physical proxy for silver output — in effect a mining-side measure of the Roman money supply. If money-supply mechanics operated in antiquity as they do now, that supply signal should propagate first into the currency and then into prices. The conjecture is therefore twofold: ice-core lead flux should co-move with the silver fineness of the denarius, and it should lead the price inflation recorded in Egyptian papyri by roughly a decade — the time it takes newly mined bullion to be coined, spent, and diffuse through the empire to Egyptian markets.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each overlapping window of the Greenland ice-core lead-flux record and the Egyptian papyrological price series, compute cross-correlations between lead flux and subsequent price inflation at lags of 0 to 30 years, checking co-movement with the denarius fineness series along the way. Primary clause: the peak positive cross-correlation between lead flux and papyri inflation falls at a lag of 5 to 15 years with r of at least 0.4, and lead flux correlates positively with denarius fineness; a peak at zero or negative lag, or no correlation reaching 0.4 at any lag, kills the conjecture. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

ice-core lead vs papyrological price series.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join — Greenland ice-core lead deposition as a proxy for Roman silver production, explicitly co-moving with denarius debasement — is famous published work: McConnell et al. 2018 tie lead-flux drops to the 64 CE debasement and the 3rd-century debasement nadir. The harvest's refinement (lead flux LEADING papyrological price inflation by ~a decade) was not located as tested, but the connection itself is established literature, chosen deliberately as a triage calibration item.

• McConnell et al. 2018, 'Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity', PNAS 115(22) — Explicitly links ice-core lead to denarius fineness events

Its literature citations feed the frontier as source leads (1 lead below the evidence/publication boundary, not yet reviewed).

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.