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Tribute travels light
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Claim (verbatim)
Tribute travels light. Joins transport-cost linear programming to the Codex Mendoza, the pictorial register of what each Aztec province owed Tenochtitlan. The empire had no draft animals and no wheels: every tribute load moved on a porter's back, so the true cost of a good was its weight in porter-days. A rational tribute schedule therefore solves an optimization problem — demand bulky staples like maize and beans only from nearby provinces, and demand goods with high value per kilogram (gold dust, greenstone, feathers, cacao, fine mantles) from distant ones. The claim is that the Codex Mendoza assignment approximates exactly this value-per-porter-load solution. It predicts that a province's distance from Tenochtitlan in porter-days strongly and positively predicts the share of its tribute value carried in lightweight luxuries, that staples are owed almost exclusively within a few days' carry, and that provinces far beyond that radius owe almost nothing of their tribute value in bulk goods.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across the tributary provinces of the Codex Mendoza, the rank correlation between porter-days from Tenochtitlan (tlameme load about 23 kg, 21-28 km per day) and the share of a province's tribute value carried in high value-per-kg goods (gold dust, greenstone, feathers, cacao, fine mantles) is at least +0.5; bulk staples (maize, beans, chia, amaranth) are owed almost exclusively by provinces within about 4 porter-days (~100 km); and provinces beyond 300 km owe under 5% of their tribute value in staples.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Codex Mendoza tribute matrix quantified with standard unit-weight and exchange-value tables, joined to route distances. Distance-flat staple shares, or a value-density correlation under +0.2, kills it.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
The core claim is established descriptive scholarship: Codex Mendoza summaries state directly that nearer provinces paid bulk staples and distant provinces paid high-value low-bulk goods, and Hassig's 'Trade, Tribute, and Transportation' (1985) is the standing transport-cost political economy of exactly this system. The rank-correlation quantification with porter-day thresholds was not located, but the connection is textbook.
- Hassig 1985, 'Trade, Tribute, and Transportation' (Univ. of Oklahoma Press) — The transport-cost tribute economics
Predictions
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