OCR-Based Field Extraction for Archaeological Pottery Metadata: The CENTURIA Dataset

Pottery is a primary source for reconstructing the chronological and economic dimensions of past societies. Archaeologists often document ceramic finds through technical drawings and handwritten metadata. This metadata is critical for dating, provenance attribution, and cross-site comparison, but remains inaccessible to computational analysis, requiring manual transcription of every record. We investigate whether state-of-the-art document analysis models can address this task, and introduce CENTURIA, a dataset of 507 pottery records from the Roman site of Carnuntum, providing transcriptions, bounding boxes, and structured field-level labels across seven metadata categories. Benchmarking five OCR models reveals a substantial domain gap: zero-shot transcription error reaches 15-32% SpACER-M, far exceeding rates on printed archival documents, with domain-specific fields recovered in fewer than 3% of cases. LoRA fine-tuning on just 57 samples, reflecting a realistic archival annotation budget, closes this gap, reducing transcription error to below 1.5% and recovering overall field-level accuracy above 87%. Our results show that a small expert-validated fine-tuning set suffices to convert handwritten pottery documentation into structured, searchable metadata ready for archaeological databases.

Decoding the Past: An Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Sex Attribution in Prehistoric Hand Stencils

Determining the biological sex of the individuals who created Upper Paleolithic hand stencils remains a challenging problem due to the absence of ground truth, population differences between contemporary and prehistoric groups, and the uncertainty introduced by image degradation. Traditional morphometric methods suffer from high structural overlap across sexes, poor cross-population generalizability, and subjective feature engineering. This study presents an uncertainty-aware deep learning framework for sex attribution in prehistoric hand stencils that explicitly models, propagates, and aggregates uncertainty throughout the analytical pipeline. The methodology combines dual image processing, dual contour extraction, structured silhouette augmentation, model architectural diversity, and ensemble-based decision aggregation. The pipeline generates twelve plausible silhouette realizations per stencil to capture boundary uncertainties, which are processed by two ensembles of ten deep neural networks each (EfficientNet-B3 and MobileViT-S) trained on 14,036 contemporary hand samples. Furthermore, a triangulated validation scheme integrates ensemble predictions with unsupervised 2D latent-space manifold mapping (UMAP + k-NN) and explainable AI spatial attributions (LayerCAM) to ensure anatomical consistency. On contemporary data, ensemble models achieve strong classification performance, with accuracies exceeding 88% in older age groups. When applied to prehistoric stencils, the framework produces both sex predictions and confidence measures of internal agreement, enabling the distinction between morphologically stable and ambiguous cases. Convergence across ensemble predictions, latent-space structure, and interpretability analyses shows that uncertainty can become a measurable component of archaeological inference, enabling robust and reproducible decoding of ancient rock art.

GPU-Accelerated Inverse Structural Anastylosis from Block Collapse Dynamics

The physical anastylosis of collapsed architectural monuments -- the meticulous reassembly of fallen stone elements into their original structural configuration -- represents one of the most intellectually demanding challenges in conservation science. Traditional approaches depend heavily on expert archaeologist judgement and manual block-by-block correspondence, a process that is both labour-intensive and inherently subjective. Inspired by the combinatorial complexity of this problem as manifested in the game of Jenga, we present Jenga Inverse Predictor , a GPU-accelerated deep learning framework that addresses structural anastylosis as an inverse prediction task. Given an image of a collapsed block assembly, JIP-2 reconstructs the most probable prior tower configuration by: (1) implementing a complete rigid-body physics engine with OBB/SAT collision detection and a Projected Gauss-Seidel (PGS) contact solver accelerated with Numba JIT and CuPy CUDA; (2) applying the analytical force thresholds of Ziglar (CMU, 2006) -- F_app = 3*mu_s*m*g (Y-axis, torque-free) and F_app = 4*mu_s*m*g (X-axis, torque risk) -- over three friction levels (mu_s in {0.25, 0.40, 0.60}) across 450 simulated episodes; (3) training a dual-stream ResNet-18 that injects a friction one-hot vector and jointly predicts block removal count, per-position removal probabilities, centre-of-mass imbalance, and Ziglar torque risk; and (4) generating a smooth 3-D video of the block-by-block reverse reconstruction. We discuss implications for computer-assisted anastylosis at the UNESCO Maya site of Uxmal, Yucatan, and provide a detailed technical description of the full pipeline, architecture, and loss formulation.