AI-powered software AutArch automatically extracts data from archaeological drawings and photographs, ensuring that findings preserved in libraries contribute to the ongoing digital revolution in archaeology
12 June 2025
Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), in collaboration with international partners, have developed a software called AutArch. It harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to revisit old archaeological collections and could thus revolutionize archaeological data analysis. The research results are available in the high-impact Journal of Archaeological Science. AutArch is available as open-source software on GitHub and Zenodo.
AutArch finds and relates information in catalogues
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? AutArch opens up completely new possibilities 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," explained Dr. Maxime Brami, who led the project at Mainz University. For archaeologists, this means they can use AutArch to automatically combine and analyze 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 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", said 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.
Widely applicable and scalable software
AutArch is scalable and can serve the needs of the ever-growing field of digital humanities. "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", added Antoine Muller, a Palaeolithic researcher at the University of Bergen in Norway and one of the authors of the study. Not only can AutArch 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," summarized Dr. Maxime Brami. "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. Professor Ralf Lämmel, a computer scientist from the University of Koblenz, for instance, oversaw the implementation of the machine learning aspects and the statistical validation of the results. The project was initiated by Dr. Maxime Brami with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The work also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.