# r2-edh-b1-23

**Claim (as registered):** One specific northern-Italian holdout province (Transpadana) shows an elevated stele share of its monument-typed rows (20% or more), matching one specific training-side province's (Aemilia's) exceptional stele share via a shared regional funerary tradition distinct from the classic Roman altar/sarcophagus repertoire.

**Proposed mechanism:** A regional funerary-monument tradition specific to Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), predicted to extend from one Cisalpine region to a neighboring one sharing the same substrate culture. This claim rests on a single training exemplar, disclosed as a genuine limitation.

**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. Single named holdout target: Transpadana. Minimum support: at least 100 monument-typed rows.

**Training-side evidence:** The training exemplar's true corrected stele share (after fixing a denominator error in an earlier description) is 43.81% (85 of 194 monument-typed rows).

**Holdout test and outcome:** Transpadana landed at 21.38% (31 of 145 monument-typed rows).

**Status:** Survived on the one province tested.
