Threshold-wear census

Status: No prior located

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Threshold-wear census. This joins medieval pilgrimage history to tribology, the physics of wear. Every pilgrim who crossed a church threshold removed a microscopic layer of stone, and centuries of feet turned steps into shallow basins; the missing volume is a footfall counter that no medieval institution could falsify or embellish. 3D scanning can now measure that eroded volume precisely, and — after correcting for stone hardness and age of installation — step erosion should rank churches by cumulative pilgrimage volume. The conjecture adds an external check: medieval institutions kept their own attendance proxies in offering receipts and indulgence registers, so the wear-derived rankings should match the documentary rankings wherever both survive. Along the Compostela routes, with their graded hierarchy of major and minor shrines, scanned thresholds should reproduce the pecking order the account books record.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each church in a campaign of scans along the Compostela routes, 3D-scan worn thresholds and steps, compute eroded volume, and normalize by stone hardness and years of exposure to yield a wear index; independently rank the same churches by pilgrimage volume using offering receipts and indulgence registers. Primary clause: the rank correlation between wear index and documentary ranking must be positive and strong — Spearman's rho of at least 0.6 — across churches with usable records; a weak or absent correlation after material and age corrections means thresholds do not record footfall and the claim fails. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

scans along the Compostela routes.

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

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

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

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05)

3D wear-quantification methods are established for stone artefacts (lithics domain) and pilgrimage-site wear is documented anecdotally (Scala Santa grooves), but no systematic 3D-scanned wear census across route points cross-referenced against offering/indulgence registers was located — the join appears unmade. No prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05).

'3D modelling of stone artefacts' review, JCAA — Enabling wear-metrology methods (portable lithics)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

No community feedback yet.

Add your take

Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.