TEHRAN – A system of AI algorithms has been created by archaeologists from the University of Bologna that can locate previously undiscovered archaeological sites in the southern Mesopotamian plain.

Every application field has multiple uses for deep learning. It can assist with classifying items and text in the context of archaeology, identifying similarities, creating 3D models, and locating sites.

The team conducted a test in Iraq’s Maysan province, where the AI algorithm correctly identified sites of interest with an accuracy of 80 percent.

The study's findings, which were published in the journal Scientific Reports, highlight the problem of the large number of resources needed to analyze the thousands of satellite photos that are stored in archives. However, using an automatic AI system would greatly reduce the time and resources required.

According to the study authors: “This procedure falls into the domain of Remote Sensing (RS) which indicates the act of detecting and/or monitoring a point of interest from a distance. In the world of archaeology, this operation has become invaluable with the availability of more and better imagery from satellites that can be combined with older sources of information.”

The study team made use of a dataset made up of vector shapes that represented the archaeologically known sites in the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. Using pre-trained models for semantic segmentation, honed on satellite imagery, and masks of the site shapes, they developed a system through training that is capable of identifying and delineating sites.

The study authors said: “The potential applications of this method are far-reaching and do not only concern its speed: it should rather be seen as a necessary complement to traditional expert-based photointerpretation, adding to the latter in many cases site features which may go overlooked but are likely to be significant.”

In the narrow sense, according to Britannica, Mesopotamia is the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north or northwest of the bottleneck in Baghdad, in modern Iraq. However, in the broader sense, the name Mesopotamia has come to be used for the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest.

AFM