AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Wear-rate velocity
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Wear-rate velocity. Circulation velocity — how fast money changes hands, a quantity economists struggle to measure even today — is here read off the physical surfaces of the coins themselves. Every transaction abrades a coin slightly, so cumulative wear divided by time in circulation records how hard the coin worked. Calibrate the wear-per-year rate on issues of known date, and coin wear becomes a velocity meter for the ancient economy. The conjecture adds a directional prediction: in crises, hoarded coin comes back out — households dishoard to survive — so the same physical record should show velocity spiking exactly when independent sources report crisis, with high-wear cohorts concentrated in crisis strata. Three-dimensional wear metrology on stratified site finds, where archaeological context dates the moment of loss, supplies the readings.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each coin recovered in dated stratigraphic context, measure surface wear by 3D metrology, calibrating wear-per-year on issues whose minting and loss dates bracket known circulation spans. Compare inferred velocity (wear per circulating year) between crisis and non-crisis periods identified independently. Primary clause: mean wear-per-year in crisis-period strata exceeds that in adjacent non-crisis strata by at least 20 percent, consistent with dishoarding spikes; equal or lower crisis-period wear rates kill the conjecture. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
3D wear metrology on stratified site finds.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Imported conversation (verbatim harvest) · model: claude-fable-5
Origin: operator conversation with Claude Fable 5 at max effort, conducted 2026-07-03, relayed verbatim by the operator into the shepherd session on 2026-07-04. No ModelRun exists for the original generation (it happened outside the pipeline); this transcript file is the canonical capture. Transcript path: docs/generated/conjecture_harvest_fablemax_20260703.md. Model (operator-attested, not pipeline-recorded): claude-fable-5. Novelty disclaimer (verbatim, load-bearing -- rule 4): "Same caveat as before, doubled: at 100 items across all of archaeology and history, some of these will have cousins in the literature I can't check. What I can guarantee is the format — each links two things not normally linked, and each names the dataset or measurement that would kill it."
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
The core join — coin wear as an estimator of circulation velocity — is published: a compound-Poisson wear model explicitly frames weight loss as a way to estimate velocity of circulation, and numismatic wear-based lifetime-in-circulation estimates are established practice. The crisis-dishoarding velocity-spike prediction was not located as tested, but the connection is not new.
- 'Coin wear: A power law for small shocks', Physica A — Compound-Poisson wear model as velocity-of-circulation estimator (snippet-cited; full text 403)
- American Numismatic Society, 'The Lifetime in Circulation of Visigothic Coins' — Wear as circulation-duration estimator in numismatic practice
Predictions
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