Ancient Ceramics: Computer aided Classification

The classification of pottery as found in many archaeological sites around the world is a time consuming and often tedious task which can take months and even years for a single site. Many of the seemingly less interesting artifacts simply disappear into storage unclassified. Automating the classification of pottery would hence be a welcome help for many archaeologists, freeing them from routine work. In addition the routine classification of all finds across several sites might also yield new and interesting results which would not have been possible using traditional approaches. This paper describes a first proof of concept for the classification machinery inside such a system and demonstrates that even with a rather haphazardly chosen set of features and an untrained system reasonable classification results are possible.