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Peutinger's seams
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)
Peutinger's seams. The Tabula Peutingeriana, the famous medieval copy of a Roman route map, was almost certainly compiled from multiple earlier itineraries rather than drawn from any single survey. Each source itinerary would carry its own error habits — its own units, rounding conventions, and characteristic sloppiness — and those habits should survive compilation as regional signatures. The conjecture is that the map's segment-distance errors are therefore not homogeneous but cluster by province: within a province the error mean and variance stay consistent, while between provinces they shift, marking the seams where one source ended and another began. Error-variance clustering would thus recover the map's lost sources, doing for cartography what stemmatics does for manuscripts — reconstructing a compilation's components from the pattern of its mistakes.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each road segment on the Tabula Peutingeriana with a known real route length, compute the distance error, then apply error-variance clustering: fit one model with a single homogeneous error distribution and one with province-level error means and variances. Primary clause: the province-level model beats the single-source model by ΔBIC > 10, and at least three distinct province clusters emerge whose between-cluster error variance exceeds within-cluster variance (ANOVA p < 0.01). The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
error-variance clustering.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
In the atlas
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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
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That the Tabula Peutingeriana compiles multiple source itineraries is established — mixed distance units (Roman miles vs Gallic leugae by section) are already cited as evidence — and single-route distance comparisons across parallel itineraries exist. The systematic province-by-province error-variance clustering to reconstruct the source stemma was not located.
- Tabula Peutingeriana mixed-unit evidence (History of Information overview) — Multi-source compilation already inferred from units
- 'Listing settlements and distances: Emona-Singidunum road comparison' — Single-segment cross-itinerary comparison
Predictions
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