Recycled-glass crisis index

Claim (verbatim)

Recycled-glass crisis index. This joins Roman economic history to archaeometric chemistry. Fresh Roman glass was made in a handful of great Levantine furnaces and shipped west as raw chunks; when supply chains ran smoothly, workshops melted fresh glass, and when they faltered, workshops fed broken cullet back into the pot. Recycling leaves a chemical fingerprint: fresh batches were decolorized with either antimony or manganese, so mixed antimony–manganese signatures betray remelted scrap. The recycling fraction is therefore a business-cycle indicator in silica. The conjecture predicts it rises along two gradients at once: with political crisis, as disruption chokes the long-distance flow of fresh glass, and with distance from the Levantine furnaces, since remoter workshops felt shortages first and worst. Third-century crisis decades should show the recycling signal spiking, most sharply in the far western provinces.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each assemblage in compositional time series through the 3rd century, classify glass as fresh or recycled by its antimony–manganese mixing signature, and compute the recycled fraction per site per generation alongside distance from the Levantine primary furnaces; regress recycled fraction on a crisis chronology and on furnace distance. Primary clause: both coefficients must be positive and significant, with the recycled fraction during the mid-3rd-century crisis exceeding the 2nd-century baseline by at least 10 percentage points at comparable sites; absence of a crisis-linked rise kills the claim. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

compositional time series through the 3rd century.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Compositional studies document the rising antimony-manganese recycling signature through the 3rd-4th centuries AND tie the 3rd-century antimony shift to loss of access to Dacian mines — a political-supply-crisis explanation of a recycling-composition trend, which is the conjecture's core mechanism in print. The formalized crisis INDEX (recycling fraction regressed on crisis chronology and distance from Levantine furnaces) was not located.

• 'The rise and fall of antimony: Sourcing the colourless in Roman glass', JAS Reports — Sb-Mn recycling trend + Dacian-mines crisis link
• 'Glass groups, glass supply and recycling in late Roman Carthage', AAS — Recycling/supply compositional analysis

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.