# r2-edh-b1-06

**Claim (as registered):** Exact-precision dating (a single specific year, as opposed to a range or no date) stays a minority pattern, at or under 40% of dated rows, in every eligible province.

**Proposed mechanism:** Proposed as a broad documentation-convention ceiling: precise single-year dating is intrinsically rare in Roman epigraphy generally (most inscriptions are dated by style, formula, or a named event to a plausible span, not pinned to one year), so no province is expected to break the ceiling.

**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 20 dated rows in a province.

**Training-side evidence:** After correcting a denominator error found in an earlier description of this training pattern, the true training-side maximum is 38.14% (in one Anatolian province) -- close to, but still under, the 40% ceiling.

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 29 eligible holdout provinces, the closest approach was 38.46% (one Mauretanian province), still under the 40% ceiling.

**Status:** Survived (the closest approach, in training and in holdout alike, stayed just under the ceiling).
