# r2-edh-b1-14

**Claim (as registered):** The single busiest century (by inscription date) falls in the 1st or 2nd century AD in every eligible province, with one named, pre-registered exception (a Mesopotamian province, exempted in advance from this specific requirement).

**Proposed mechanism:** "The epigraphic habit" -- a broadly documented pattern in Roman social history whereby the rate of erecting inscriptions rose and peaked within a bounded historical window across most of the Roman world, tracking the empire's period of greatest stability and monumentalizing culture under the early-to-mid Principate. The named exception is exempted because its Roman-controlled period was brief and late (annexed only briefly under one emperor, then re-established only from a later imperial campaign roughly a century afterward), so its own peak was independently expected to fall later than the rest of the corpus.

**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; the named exception's own outcome never counts toward this claim either way.

**Training-side evidence:** 12 of 12 checked training provinces peaked in the 1st or 2nd century AD (9 in the 2nd, 3 in the 1st).

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 18 eligible holdout provinces (excluding the named exception), all 18 (100%) peaked in the 1st or 2nd century AD.

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