Archeologists have taught computers to sort ancient pottery fragments

TORONTO -- Archeologists at Northern Arizona University (NAU) have taught computers to sort pottery fragments by design and style to assist in classification and reconstruction. Previously, sorting remnants of pottery (referred to as sherds) found at archeological sites was painstaking, tedious and reliant on experts. "On many of the thousands of archeological sites scattered across the American Southwest, archeologists will often find broken fragments of pottery known as sherds. Then researchers had pottery experts sort the design type for every sherd in the photographs and create “training sets” of sherds for the machine to learn from. The researchers then began training the computer to identify other types of pottery by using pottery specimens that are agreed upon by archeologists.