Non-Candles 300

How to Read This Catalog

This catalog is a working inventory of candidates that look tempting at first glance but do not survive the project's gate tests for the specific kind of non-closure at issue: cases where forcing a single "solution" would require adding assumptions the evidence does not warrant.

The Roman dodecahedron is not included as a "non-instance." It is excluded for the opposite reason: it serves as the project's clean calibrator for the epistemic kind of non-closure being screened for. The Non-Candles catalog exists to demonstrate that most other "mystery objects" fail this profile for identifiable reasons.

Anchor for the wider framework: When I intervene with understanding, am I completing a process — or ending it?

Failure Points

• Completion (Test 1/2): The object's "mystery" is a missing detail; explanation would mainly complete understanding, not end a living interval.
• Operationality trap (Test 3): The object has ordinary functional affordances; explanation tends to resolve into use-case/tool-class.
• Context / provenance / natural (Test 4): More context, better dating, or a natural/modern explanation would collapse the anomaly.
• Symbolic / representational (Constraint 3): Representational or ritual artifacts; explanation adds context/meaning rather than creating a hazardous convergence problem.
• Communicative / banned (Constraint 2): Scripts, inscriptions, calendars, maps, codes — decoding is a different task category.
• Bucket class (Constraint 6): Plural assemblages/hoards/collections rather than a single clean object-type.
• Non-object / pseudoscience (Constraint 0): Not a real artifact.