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Archaeology in the age of big data: User-friendly software streamlines analysis of past collections

Archaeologists often face major challenges when trying to connect new discoveries with information from old books: How can the findings of 200 years of archaeological research be combined with new data?

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 their results in the Journal of Archaeological Science on June 3, 2025. AutArch is available as open source software on and .

AutArch opens up completely new avenues. It is based on neural networks that researchers have trained to independently detect, analyze, and relate common archaeological "objects" in catalogs, 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 artifacts in museum collections.

"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 Paleolithic 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."