Chavin de Huantar Potsherd Impression Analysis

Chav́ın de Huántar is an archaeological site of critical interest for intepreting the Andean archaeological record. In this paper, we present our work on developing an object recognition system to classify Chav́ın pot sherds by decorative impressions. We trained and evaluated MSER and SURF based classification systems on a small labeled set of replica sherds and achieved classification accuracy of 75%. The performance of our system is comparable with a similar system built for ancient coin classification [8] [9] and represents a promising first step in developing an automatic sherd classification system for archaeologists interested in Chav́ın pottery or, more generally, in pattern recognition for the analysis of archaeological ceramics.