Treaty and frontier source ledger, 1829-1947

KAN-351 freezes the legal-source minimum for the treaty/frontier workstream before digitisation. The ledger is treaty-frontier-sources.csv, and its eight minimum IDs and file hash are fixed in source-ledger-manifest.json.

Frozen instruments

The sequence distinguishes final treaties, an arbitration award, and an armistice. The schema also reserves distinct types for proposal_map, negotiated_line, implementation_instrument, and later_reconstruction. Those records must be added separately; they must never be folded into the final instrument whose interpretation they illuminate.

Interpretation and confidence

Each row carries the signing date and precision, legal context, territorial scope, full citation, article/page locator, repository, stable URL, rights posture, interpretation state, alternatives, confidence, and geometry status. An ambiguous or disputed row is invalid without named alternatives.

The alternatives deliberately distinguish:

• the legal wording in an instrument;
• an attached or treaty-era map;
• the boundary commission’s later delimitation or demarcation;
• national implementation records; and
• later scholarly or GIS reconstruction.

Confidence describes the present interpretation of the candidate source, not the positional accuracy of uncreated geometry. All rows remain candidate.

Geometry rule

The only allowed states before digitisation are no_geometry, commission_geometry_required, map_not_georeferenced, and annex_map_unacquired. There is intentionally no authoritative_modern_gis state. A modern boundary layer can be a finding aid or comparison, but it cannot become authoritative merely because it is convenient or machine-readable.

Digitisation can begin only after the relevant treaty text, map, and implementation record have separate typed entries and their differences have been adjudicated. Geometry then needs its own provenance, uncertainty, and review evidence under the GIS ticket.

Rights posture

The Hertslet volumes are public-domain text in research scans. U.S. Department of State documentary-series pages are U.S. government works. United Nations volumes and the official-series pointer for the 1913 treaty remain explicitly rights_review_required or un_reuse_review_required; access is not treated as blanket permission to republish scans or maps.