[treerunner]

I was trained in Archaeology as an undergrad. I have considered neural nets as a possibility for classification tasks that may otherwise be time consuming. But the material still needs to be collected, cleaned and catalogued by human hands. There are steps along the way where skilled humans can classify objects. The neural net might be a way to confirm or flag human decisions but I would not rely on it as a primary means of classification. The things that are interesting are on the edges of any classification. Transitional artifacts or anomalies. For these you will need human interpretation. Also, I do begin to wonder why we would even bother if no human will be interacting with a given artifact, why not leave it in the ground undisturbed? If that’s even possible. But I start thinking, with the ease of AI, if we are painting ourselves out of the picture. Like using GPT3 to respond to emails as a solution to the problem of too many emails. And imagine the respondent doing the same.

[escape_goat]

Teruakohatu had offered a link to the original paper, if you were interested. It's here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...

[jonnycomputer]

Same here.

Maybe if imaging pot sherds is part of your standard procedure it'd make save time. But the imaging itself could be quite laborious.

In any case, this relies on a pre-existing model--trained on labeled data.