# r2-edh-b1-24

**Claim (as registered):** The average width of the resolved date range (for range-precision rows only; exact-precision rows are excluded, since they have a trivial zero-width range by construction) stays within 20 to 250 years in every eligible province.

**Proposed mechanism:** Epigraphic date-range resolution (when an inscription cannot be pinned to a single year, it is bracketed to a plausible span, often by a convention such as an emperor's reign) is proposed to fall within a normal, convention-driven band -- neither implausibly narrow nor implausibly wide -- regardless of province.

**Scope:** Source: the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), a catalogue of Roman-period inscriptions on stone/metal/etc. (physical objects, catalogued separately from a manuscript census). Training: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically first half of EDH's own province-code order (42,009 inscriptions). Holdout: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically second half, minus 'Provincia incerta' (EDH's own catch-all for uncertain findspots, not a real geographic unit, excluded from all arithmetic) -- 32 real provinces, 39,457 inscriptions -- landed in one complete fetch after the claim was fixed. EDH's own content has been fixed since 2021 (the cataloguing project's funding ended), so this holdout tests whether a pattern generalizes across an arbitrary alphabetical split of already-catalogued, unchanging material, not whether it predicts new discoveries. Minimum support: at least 30 range-precision rows in a province.

**Training-side evidence:** Narrowest training-side average: 26.63 years (n=38). Widest: 231.37 years (n=457).

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 24 eligible holdout provinces, the closest approach to the floor was 71.20 years.

**Status:** Survived every eligible holdout province.
