Taphonomic preservation as a causal-inference problem

A thin domain layer that recasts the question "is this body's preservation natural or anomalous?" as a treatment-effect estimate over MORIE's existing causal estimators. It adds no new statistics: it documents the taphonomy variable set and dispatches to morie_estimate_irm / morie_estimate_cate, then attaches an E-value (morie_e_value) that quantifies how strong an unmeasured cause would have to be to explain away the natural preservation effect – i.e. it turns a claim of "incorruptibility" into a bounded statistical one.

Details

This module ships no data. Forensic-taphonomy comparanda (documented lime/desiccation burials with preservation outcomes) and any non-invasive readings of a specific case (CT/micro-CT density, pXRF elemental signatures, hyperspectral surface composition) must be supplied by the caller from real sources. morie_taphonomy_schema returns a typed, zero-row frame describing the expected columns; it never fabricates rows.

What it can and cannot do. With comparanda it estimates the average preservation effect attributable to burial processing (e.g. quicklime desiccation) and reports the E-value residual. It cannot falsify a miracle: a small natural-preservation probability yields a delta, not a disproof (Chernozhukov et al. 2018 give the effect; VanderWeele & Ding 2017 bound the unmeasured-confounding needed to nullify it).

References

Chernozhukov V, et al. (2018). Double/debiased machine learning. The Econometrics Journal 21(1), C1–C68. doi:10.1111/ectj.12097

VanderWeele TJ, Ding P (2017). Sensitivity analysis in observational research: introducing the E-value. Annals of Internal Medicine 167(4), 268–274. doi:10.7326/M16-2607