News from the ancient world
AI & Archaeology · new tools for the ancient world · 18 stories
How artificial intelligence reads ancient texts, finds lost sites in lidar and satellite images, and changes how the ancient world is studied.
Funded by Schmidt Sciences, the team will gather at least 100,000 real and simulated broken objects, and archaeologists will check the reconstructions the AI proposes.
A refitted flint nucleus from about 250,000 BC, found in Maastricht, its flakes pieced back together. Photo: Kleon3, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
AI & Archaeology · Classical Greece · Ancient Agora, Athens, Attica, Greece
Georgia Tech researchers have a $225,000 grant to build models that propose reconstructions of classical buildings, but their announcement reports no results yet.
AI & Archaeology · Holocene · Southern edge of the Nefud Desert, Northern Saudi Arabia
Three deep learning models scanned satellite images of about 2,500 square kilometres on the southern edge of the Nefud, where Holocene communities built cairns and enclosures.
AI & Archaeology · Imagery 2016–2023 (site ages not given) · Afghanistan (1,943 sites), Afghanistan
Trained on 1,943 Afghan sites, the best model scored 0.926 out of 1 at telling looted sites from intact ones, but the study is not yet peer reviewed.
AI & Archaeology · c. 2500 BC–AD 100 · Mesopotamia, Iraq
A short 2026 workshop paper describes a neural system that translates both into and out of Akkadian, the ancient language of Mesopotamia, and displays cuneiform.
AI & Archaeology · c. 5400 BC–AD 220 · 18 sites across China, China
A model called APSNet, built on 8,340 microscope images of seeds from 18 Chinese sites in 17 plant types, scored 90.2% accuracy.
AI & Archaeology · c. 400–200 BC · Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico
The charcoal drawing shows the hero twin Juun Ajaw hunting in water beside a ritual calendar day sign, in a building possibly built between 400 and 200 BC.
AI & Archaeology · 2nd century BC · Herculaneum, Campania, Italy
Nearly 1.5 metres of text from PHerc. 1667, a Greek philosophical work of around the 2nd century BC that may be Stoic, were recovered with X-ray scans and AI.
AI & Archaeology · Late Second Temple period · Qumran, Judean Desert, Levant
A Groningen-led international team will test about 250 scroll samples chemically and use AI and handwriting study to trace where the scrolls were made.
AI & Archaeology · c. 1500 BC · Hittite tablets of ancient Anatolia, Central Anatolia, Turkey
Palaeographicum, built by teams in Würzburg, Mainz and Dortmund, searches 70,000 photographs of 3,500-year-old tablets for cuneiform signs written the same way.
AI & Archaeology · AD 79 · Pompeii, Porta Stabia necropolis, Campania, Italy
The image, made with the University of Padua, is the Pompeii park's first created with AI tools and is called an experimental prototype, not a definitive likeness.
AI & Archaeology · Roman, 27 BC–AD 476 · Heerlen (Roman Coriovallum), Limburg, Netherlands
Wear marks on a carved limestone object from Roman Heerlen, fed into game simulations, point to a blocking game in which four pieces trap two.
AI & Archaeology · 8th to mid-9th century AD · Sanage kiln, Aichi Prefecture, Japan
A deep learning model trained on 917 scanned pieces of Sue ware sorted five pottery types with 93.2% accuracy, and struggled most to separate dishes from bowls.
AI & Archaeology · Middle Palaeolithic (Neanderthals) · Orono (University of Maine), Maine, United States
Images showed hairy, stooped figures with few women or children, and about half of ChatGPT's narratives on Neanderthal life clashed with current archaeological research.