LiDAR rank-size politics

Claim (verbatim)

LiDAR rank-size politics. Airborne LiDAR has stripped the canopy from the Maya lowlands and revealed settlement in the tens of thousands of structures, making true regional settlement hierarchies measurable for the first time; settlement-scaling theory, meanwhile, holds that integrated urban systems produce Zipfian rank-size distributions while weakly integrated ones drift log-normal, because integration lets big centres grow at the expense of the rest. Maya epigraphy independently records the politics — which eras saw hegemonic polities unify regions, and which dissolved into fragmentation. The conjecture joins the two: Maya settlement rank-size should be Zipfian within unified polities and log-normal in fragmented eras, so that the shape of the settlement distribution alone reads out the degree of political integration. The statistics from the lasers should agree with the history from the stones.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each region-period cell with LiDAR settlement-hierarchy coverage and an epigraphically attested political status, fit both a power law (Zipf) and a log-normal to the settlement rank-size distribution and compare by likelihood ratio. Primary clause: in at least two-thirds of cells, the better-fitting distribution matches the epigraphic classification — power law where the texts attest unified hegemony, log-normal where they attest fragmentation. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

LiDAR settlement hierarchies vs epigraphic political history.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join — settlement rank-size distribution shape as a gauge of political centralization vs fragmentation — is an established archaeological method with statistical-confidence machinery, and Maya LiDAR settlement studies already read spatial patterning politically (Puuc fragmentation). The specific Zipf-vs-lognormal discrimination keyed to epigraphically dated unification/fragmentation periods was not located as executed, but the connection is standard method, not a new join. Chosen leak-suspect in the pilot; confirmed here.

• 'Comparing archaeological settlement systems with rank-size graphs', JAS — The established method incl. political interpretation
• 'Lidar survey of ancient Maya settlement in the Puuc region', PLOS One — Maya LiDAR settlement-politics reading

Predictions

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