# r2-edh-b1-08

**Claim (as registered):** Material diversity (distinct recorded material values, e.g. marble, limestone, bronze) is at least 5 in every eligible province.

**Proposed mechanism:** The same vocabulary-breadth reasoning as the genre-diversity floor above, applied to the recorded material field (118 distinct material values exist across the whole 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 50 material-typed rows in a province.

**Training-side evidence:** Observed training-side minimum: 7 distinct materials (in an Anatolian province, n=67 typed rows).

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 18 eligible holdout provinces, the closest approach to the floor was 8 distinct materials.

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