# r2-edh-b1-16

**Claim (as registered):** The epigraphic-activity curve is compact, not flat: at least 90% of a province's dated rows fall within a six-century window (two centuries before to three centuries after) centred on that province's own peak century.

**Proposed mechanism:** Epigraphic production in any given province is proposed to be concentrated around a single historical era of peak activity rather than spread evenly across the whole Roman period, regardless of when that peak happens to fall for that particular 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 150 dated rows in a province (same underlying date histogram as the epigraphic-habit claim above).

**Training-side evidence:** After correcting a window-width error found in an earlier description of this training pattern, the true training-side tightest case is 91.08% (in a southern Iberian province).

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 18 eligible holdout provinces, the closest approach to the floor was 92.59%.

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