this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
42 points (100.0% liked)

Archaeology

2414 readers
96 users here now

Welcome to c/Archaeology @ Mander.xyz!

Shovelbums welcome. ๐Ÿ—ฟ

Notice Board

This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

About

Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. No pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology.

Links

Archaeology 101:

Get Involved:

University and Field Work:

Jobs and Career:

Professional Organisations:

FOSS Tools:

Datasets:

Fun:

Other Resources:

Similar Communities

Sister Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Plants & Gardening

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Memes

Find us on Reddit

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
42
First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It's a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius' volcanic ash in 79 CE. It's fully carbonised but they're using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they're using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.

The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they're confident that they "will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety". And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Contramuffin 3 points 4 days ago

My position has always been that AI is useful given these conditions:

  1. Both the input and output of the AI are defined and limited in scope (ie, designed to serve a specific purpose rather than be multi-purpose)
  2. It is difficult or impossible to come up with an algorithm that can do the same thing (ie, too many variables to be easily analyzed)
  3. How the output is derived is unimportant or less important than the final output itself

This is a genuinely good application of AI:

  1. The AI is designed to identify and read text in scrolls
  2. The combination of low signal in the scan and requirement for image recognition capabilities makes AI perhaps the only feasible solution for the problem
  3. We care about the text itself, not why we think the text is what it is