Testing a proposed transcontinental great circle alignment: Land-constrained Monte Carlo baselines, geographic explanations, and localized monument divergence at the Memphis necropolis

v5: Merged manuscript combining earlier Papers 1 and 2, with land-constrained Monte Carlo baselines, temporal decomposition, coastal bias correction, and eight-database replication. This version supersedes all previous versions (v1–v4). Submitted to Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Earlier versions tested the Alison great circle alignment using distribution-matched Monte Carlo baselines. This version introduces land-constrained baselines correcting for coastal jitter bias (Z-score reductions of 31–73%), temporal decomposition at 250-year resolution localizing the monument-settlement divergence to the Memphis necropolis (2750–2500 BCE), and comprehensive falsification of auxiliary hypotheses. All code and data: github.com/thegreatcircledata/great-circle-analysis