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Masons' mark rosters
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)
Masons' mark rosters. Medieval masons cut personal marks into the blocks they dressed — piece-work signatures for the paymaster — and a cathedral wall therefore carries, frozen in stone, a record of who cut what. Work organisation leaves statistical fingerprints: if masons produced blocks in stints and lodges rotated their crews, the runs of a given mark along a course and the hand-offs between marks encode the shift schedule. The conjecture is that mark distributions across coursework can reconstruct that schedule, and that they will show two specific signatures: batch sizes — consecutive blocks by the same hand — distributed as Poisson, the trace of stochastic stint lengths, and gangs alternating by course, as one crew's output was laid while another's was cut. The spatial statistics of masons' marks at well-documented cathedrals would then turn graffiti into a workshop roster — medieval timesheets, recoverable by counting.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
At documented cathedrals with masons' marks mapped block-by-block, extract run lengths of consecutive same-mark blocks within courses and the sequence of dominant mark-sets across successive courses. Primary clause: within-course batch sizes fit a Poisson distribution (goodness-of-fit not rejected at p > 0.05 for the majority of recorded walls), and adjacent courses differ in dominant mark-set more often than expected under random assignment (alternation significantly above chance). The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
mark spatial statistics at documented cathedrals.
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
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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
Masons'-mark spatial distributions are already used to reconstruct building chronology and team assignment (Rochester Cathedral's every-marked-stone 3D model; James's bottom-up Chartres argument) — the same evidence category and inferential use. The specific statistical tests (Poisson batch sizes; systematic gang alternation by course) were not located.
- Rochester Cathedral Masons' Marks project (Kent Archaeological Society) — Course-by-course mark model used for team/chronology inference
Predictions
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