That sounds like a very expensive & large doodad for a simple tent where lashing would work fine. Even assuming it’d work (wouldn’t that just leave the poles wiggling around inside?), that would also seem to not satisfy the requirement to explain why it’s found in many sites (not just military encampments) such as buried in coin hoards, why the holes are of apparently random and inconsistent sizes, or to explain why all of them rigorously go to the trouble of adding on many expensive nodules most of which would be unused (and I think it would be predictable which ones you would not be using for a tent and you could simply give it an orientation). There’s also 1 found icosahedron which has no holes at all, which is bad news for any glove-knitting, surveying, or tent-poling theory, but is not an issue for other theories like fortune-telling or game-playing.
That sounds like a very expensive & large doodad for a simple tent where lashing would work fine. Even assuming it’d work (wouldn’t that just leave the poles wiggling around inside?), that would also seem to not satisfy the requirement to explain why it’s found in many sites (not just military encampments) such as buried in coin hoards, why the holes are of apparently random and inconsistent sizes, or to explain why all of them rigorously go to the trouble of adding on many expensive nodules most of which would be unused (and I think it would be predictable which ones you would not be using for a tent and you could simply give it an orientation). There’s also 1 found icosahedron which has no holes at all, which is bad news for any glove-knitting, surveying, or tent-poling theory, but is not an issue for other theories like fortune-telling or game-playing.