# r2-edh-b1-18

**Claim (as registered):** Bracket-density (the share of transcriptions using the standard epigraphic convention of marking lost/restored text with square brackets) stays at or above 35% in every eligible province.

**Proposed mechanism:** Ancient inscriptions on stone and metal are routinely damaged, and the convention of bracket-marking restored or missing text is applied broadly and consistently across the discipline, so a substantial bracket-density floor is expected everywhere 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 100 rows in a province.

**Training-side evidence:** Observed training-side minimum: 50.71%.

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 27 eligible holdout provinces, the closest approach to the floor was 39.26%.

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