# r2-edh-b1-12

**Claim (as registered):** At least one of the same two named upper-Danube/eastern-Alpine provinces carries 3 or more military-diploma finds (a raw count, not a share).

**Proposed mechanism:** Veteran discharge-diploma deposition (inscribed bronze certificates) is proposed to concentrate on actively-garrisoned frontier provinces, by the same frontier-military logic as the instrumentum-domesticum claim above.

**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. Named holdout targets: the same two provinces as above. No minimum-support floor (a presence/count claim; zero is itself a meaningful, decision-relevant value).

**Training-side evidence:** Frontier training provinces clearing 3 or more: 44, 17, 13, and 3 diploma finds respectively; every other training province shows 0 or 1 (one unplaced/context-only region shows 3).

**Holdout test and outcome:** One of the two named provinces landed with 45 diploma finds; the other landed with 16.

**Status:** Survived (both named targets cleared the floor of 3).
