AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Maya reservoir percolation
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)
Maya reservoir percolation. This joins the Classic Maya collapse to the physics of percolation — the mathematics of systems that fail not gradually but when a critical threshold is crossed. Lowland Maya cities rode out the dry season on constructed reservoirs, so each city's resilience was set by its water storage per capita. A uniform drought story predicts cities failing together as rainfall declines; a threshold story predicts they fail in order, each city abandoned when the shared drought pushes its particular storage-per-capita below a common critical value. The conjecture holds the second: city abandonment order follows storage-per-capita crossing a common threshold — a percolation collapse, not a uniform drought story, in which identically stressed cities die at different times because their buffers differ. LiDAR now yields reservoir volumes at scale, terminal monument dates give the abandonment order, and the ratio should predict the sequence.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each city in a panel of LiDAR reservoir volumes vs terminal monument dates, compute reservoir storage capacity from LiDAR, estimate population from mapped residential density to form storage per capita, and take the terminal long-count monument date as the abandonment proxy; rank cities on both variables. Primary clause: storage per capita must positively predict abandonment order with a rank correlation of at least 0.5 — lower-storage cities failing earlier — and the implied critical threshold must be statistically common across cities rather than region-specific; an abandonment order uncorrelated with storage per capita falsifies the claim. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
LiDAR reservoir volumes vs terminal monument dates.
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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
Socio-hydrological models already produce threshold-like population drops when reservoirs run dry, LiDAR reservoir capacities are published, and abandonment phases are dated (~760/810/860/910 CE); the specific claim — city-by-city abandonment ORDER following storage-per-capita crossing one common threshold, in percolation terms, independent of drought severity — was not located as tested.
- 'Conceptualizing socio-hydrological drought processes: the Maya collapse' (PMC) — Threshold-like collapse in reservoir-population dynamics
- 'Ancient Maya reservoirs, constructed wetlands, and future water needs', PNAS — LiDAR reservoir capacity data
Predictions
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