Question
State the historical question before choosing a visual answer.
Editorial method
How the record is handled.
The Stone Record uses a five-stage investigation engine and a visible classification system so that narrative, evidence and modern completion do not collapse into one confident picture.
05Investigation stages
The investigation engine
Question to reflection.
Investigation
Assemble the textual, material, geographic and scholarly record.
Evidence
Classify what each source can establish and record its dependency and limit.
Reconstruction
Build only a visible Working possibility, with choices and unknowns exposed.
Reflection
Return to the question with a graded answer that stops where the evidence stops.
Source capacities
Text reports. Evidence survives. Tradition transmits. Working models test a possibility.One source may be useful in more than one discussion, but its capacity does not change because a scene looks persuasive.
Claim states
Known, Inferred, Disputed and Unknown.
Known records have direct support within the controlled corpus. Inferred claims are reasoned from that support. Disputed claims have material scholarly disagreement. Unknowns remain open because the record cannot currently decide them.
Synthetic Working imagery
A reconstruction is an argument made visible.Generated and composited scenes are labelled as Synthetic Working when they show a historical model rather than surviving evidence or documentary footage. Their job is to explain the reasoning and the limit, not to impersonate the past.