A Pre-Registered Cross-Domain Protocol for Evaluating Persistence Across Historical Systems

Description This work presents a pre-registered methodological framework for evaluating whether persistence can be measured using a common analytical architecture across multiple historical systems. Rather than proposing a new physical law, the protocol defines a falsifiable experimental design for testing whether long-lived structural behavior can be identified through a shared, outcome-blind measurement procedure. The framework separates immutable constitutional principles from implementation-specific details. The constitutional layer establishes requirements for outcome-blind structure selection, frozen preprocessing, deterministic reference ensembles, pre-registered statistical evaluation, revision limits, and staged cross-domain validation. A companion reference implementation specifies one concrete realization of these requirements using multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (M-SSA), synthetic calibration, and deterministic normalization procedures. To minimize researcher degrees of freedom, the protocol incorporates multiple safeguards, including pre-registration, fixed success criteria, external verification, a bounded development budget, and an externally verifiable versioning strategy. Validation proceeds through a predefined ladder beginning with forensic taphonomy, followed by geographic transfer, environmental regime transfer, adjacent historical sciences, and finally astrophysical applications. At every stage, explicit success, partial-transfer, and failure criteria are defined before empirical testing. The principal contribution of this work is methodological rather than confirmatory. It provides a reproducible experimental protocol for evaluating whether persistence can be described using a common measurement architecture across disciplines while ensuring that both successful transfer and failure produce scientifically informative outcomes. This repository contains the constitutional protocol, reference implementation specification, mathematical framework, software architecture, synthetic calibration procedures, data-ingestion templates, statistical evaluation framework, and supporting documentation required to reproduce the proposed validation methodology. Status: Reference Protocol Version 1.0. This release documents the frozen experimental architecture prior to empirical validation using real-world datasets.