Corpus scale reassembly of fragmented bamboo slips using excavation context and latent slip properties

Excavated bamboo slips are a primary written record of early China, but reach conservators as thousands of fragments whose grouping into slips is lost, and rejoining them must precede reading, dating or display. Computational matchers return ranked candidate lists that a specialist still resolves by hand. This study treats reassembly as one constrained optimisation over a whole corpus, carrying slip length, width and scribal hand as latent properties of the slip rather than as pairwise features, with fragments deposited, dispersed and recorded as an excavation records them. On a corpus scaled to the Shuihudi Qin find it recovered 38.3% of multi-fragment slips intact against 1.4% for bipartite matching, and cut joins fusing two slips from 1977 to 331. Excavation context is the most valuable of five evidence sources tested, yet no published system uses it, and it must be read as graded evidence, not as a partition.