Tin percolation collapse

Claim (verbatim)

Tin percolation collapse. Bronze needs tin, and Late Bronze Age tin moved through a long-distance exchange network linking a handful of distant sources to every workshop in the eastern Mediterranean. In network terms, some cities were mere consumers while others were high-betweenness brokers — nodes through which a disproportionate share of the metal flow had to pass. The conjecture is that the famous cascade of destructions around 1200 BCE propagated through this network rather than across the map: the order in which sites were destroyed should follow their betweenness centrality in the metals network, with the critical brokers failing early, and should not follow geographic dominoes in which each site falls to its nearest burning neighbor. Destruction-layer dates set against modeled centrality would decide between the two propagation regimes.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Build the Late Bronze Age metals-trade network from attested tin and copper routes, compute betweenness centrality for each major site, and take destruction dates from the destruction-layer dates vs modeled network centrality dataset; regress destruction order on centrality and, separately, on geographic distance from the earliest destruction. Primary clause: betweenness predicts destruction order with Spearman ρ ≥ 0.5 (p < 0.05) and outperforms the geographic-contagion model in out-of-sample rank prediction. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

destruction-layer dates vs modeled network centrality.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join is published: recent work models the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean as a multi-layer network and analyzes the collapse as cascading failure with betweenness-centrality/'gatekeeper' node concepts (plus a systemic-risk literature doing the same). The harvest's sharp refinement — regressing site-by-site destruction-layer DATES against computed centrality rankings of a metals-specific network — was not located as executed, but the connection itself is established.

• 'Are civilizations destined to collapse? Lessons from the Mediterranean Bronze Age', Global Environmental Change (2023) — Two-layer LBA network model, cascading failure, gatekeeper centrality
• Galaitsi et al., 'Navigating the precipice: Lessons on collapse from the Late Bronze Age', Risk Analysis — Systemic-risk network framing of the collapse

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.