The ArchaAIDE Project is run by a consortium of institutions and professionals (Universities of Pisa, Barcelona, York and Cologne, Italian National Research Council, School of Computer Science at the University of Tel Aviv and IT and archaeology professionals) and it is funded by the European Union.
The goal of ArchAIDE is to create "new system for the automatic recognition of archaeological pottery", which is usually the most common artifact found in archaeological sites. Pottery analysis yield a great amount of socio-economic information, but the interpretation of ceramics requires high skills, experience and time.
In order to streamline the process and make knowledge accessible wherever, the ArchAIDE project will develop an app for smartphones and tablets. The app will allow archaeologists to take pictures of potsherds and, connceting to a database, it will recognize the sherd and retrieve information about the specific ceramic type. In addition, recognized sherds will be stored and shared. The app will also enable archaeologists to generate an electronic document about the artifact, reducing the amount of paperwork.
Such an app might revolutionize fieldwork, but is it possible to replace skilled scholars with an app? Does a streamlined interpretation and classification process have only advantages or do we still need to be reflexive when we are studying artifacts? Could this app reduce the interpretation of material culture to a mere "labelling" process?
