# r2-edh-b1-01

**Claim (as registered):** The five largest holdout provinces by inscription count account for at least 45% of the full holdout total.

**Proposed mechanism:** Proposed mechanism: uneven modern excavation/recovery and collection effort concentrates surviving, catalogued inscriptions heavily in a handful of well-excavated provinces -- an unevenness pattern expected to recur regardless of which half of the alphabet a given province's code happens to fall in.

**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.

**Training-side evidence:** The five largest training-side provinces (7,647; 6,832; 4,471; 4,440; and 3,582 inscriptions) together hold 64.21% of the 42,009-row training total.

**Holdout test and outcome:** The five largest holdout provinces (4,685; 4,393; 4,259; 3,134; and 2,771 inscriptions) together hold 48.77% of the 39,457-inscription holdout total.

**Status:** Survived (48.77% clears the 45% floor).
