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Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), together with international partners, have developed a software called “AutArch”. It harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and big data to revisit old archaeological collections — and could thus revolutionize archaeological data analysis. The researchers published their results in the high-impact journal Journal of Archaeological Science on June 3, 2025. AutArch is available as open source software on GitHub and Zenodo.
Archaeologists often face major challenges when trying to connect new discoveries with information from old books: How can the findings of two hundred years of archaeological research be combined with new data? AutArch opens up completely new avenues here. It is based on neural networks that researchers have trained to independently detect, analyze, and relate common archaeological “objects” in catalogues, such as images of graves, human remains, pottery, and stone tools. AutArch does not only locate the data, but combines them to extract meaningful information. "When analyzing a grave drawing, for instance, the software detects the north arrow and the associated scale – and can use this to calculate the actual size of the grave and its orientation”, explains Dr. Maxime Brami, who led the project at Mainz University. For archaeologists, this means they can use AutArch to automatically generate vast amounts of data, spread across many publications, to answer specific questions about the past and compare it, for instance, with 3D scans of artefacts in museum collection. “Previously, researchers had to manually extract information from images, which takes a lot of time and involves tedious tasks like resizing, reorienting, and reformatting the images”, explains Kevin Klein, software developer at JGU and first author of the study. AutArch automates the entire process. Although it uses AI, the results are never black box. A user-friendly interface allows researchers to check and adjust the automatically extracted data, ensuring accuracy and accountability.
The software is widely applicable and scalable
AutArch is scalable and can serve the needs of the ever-growing field of digital humanities. Antoine Muller, a Palaeolithic researcher and one of the authors of the study, says “the methodology is applicable to virtually any material, as long as the shape, size, and/or orientation of an object holds technological, functional, or chronological significance”. Not only can it be applied to any material, but it also grows with increasing demands. “This development represents an important step forward in the application of artificial intelligence in archaeological research,” Brami summarizes. “It has the potential to fundamentally transform data access and analysis.”
The AutArch project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort involving computer scientists and archaeologists from all over Europe. Ralf Lämmel, a computer scientist from Koblenz University, for instance, oversaw the implementation of the machine learning aspects and the statistical validation of the results. The project was initiated by Maxime Brami with the support of the German Research Foundation (COMOVE Project). The work also received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (YMPACT Project, awarded to Volker Heyd).
The open-source software is available on Zenodo and GitHub at the following links:
https://zenodo.org/records/15369892
https://github.com/kevin-klein/autarch
Images:
https://download.uni-mainz.de/presse/07_iaw_AutArch_abb1.png
Example of the object detection result for one page of catalogue (here: third millennium BC site of Vliněves, Czech Republic). Copyright: Klein et al. 2025.
https://download.uni-mainz.de/presse/07_iaw_AutArch_abb2.png
Burial orientations can be automatically retrieved from grave drawings. For instance, archaeological cultures from the third millennium BC in Central Europe buried men and women in opposite directions. This can be shown for 100 Corded Ware graves and 66 Bell Beaker graves with skeletons that have a discernible orientation from the Czech Republic analysed with AutArch. Copyright: Klein et al. 2025.
https://download.uni-mainz.de/presse/07_iaw_AutArch_abb3.png
The AutArch workflow can also extract the outline of artefacts from catalogues, such as arrowheads, allowing for various shape analyses. Copyright: Klein et al. 2025.
Dr. Maxime N. Brami
Institute for Ancient Studies
Pre- and Early Historical Archaeology
Palaeogenetics Group
Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
55099 Mainz, GERMANY
phone: +49 1638630948
e-mail: mbrami@uni-mainz.de
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440325000937
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106244
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