Research
Challenges

Carbonised Roman scrolls discovered in 1752 could not be opened without destruction for 275 years. AI-powered volumetric scanning produced the first readable text in 2023, compressing an estimated centuries-long research timeline to under 12 months.

"We are now proving not just to ourselves but to the entire global community that the scrolls are readable."

— Brent Seales

Most geoglyphs across the 450 square kilometre Peruvian desert were undetectable from ground level. A convolutional neural network identified 303 new figurative geoglyphs within six months of field survey, completing work estimated at ~100 years by traditional survey.

"It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative Nazca geoglyphs… here, we report the deployment of an AI system… leading to the discovery of 303 new figurative geoglyphs within only 6 mo."

— Sakai et al., PNAS 2024

Dense jungle canopy had concealed entire Maya urban networks from archaeologists for generations. LiDAR combined with AI processing revealed 61,480 ancient structures across 2,144 square kilometres of northern Guatemala, rewriting estimated population densities.

"This lidar survey compels a reevaluation of Maya demography, agriculture, and political economy."

— Canuto et al., Science 2018

Thousands of ancient Greek inscriptions survive only as damaged fragments, and restoring them manually took expert epigraphers hours per text with only 25% accuracy. The Ithaca deep learning model restored missing text with 62% accuracy in seconds, boosting historian accuracy to 72%.

"When historians use Ithaca as a decision-support system, their performance improves from 25% to 72% at the character level."

— Assael et al., Nature 2022

Decades of ground survey had not revealed the full extent of Angkor civilisation beneath Cambodia's forest cover. AI-assisted classification of airborne LiDAR point clouds identified anthropogenic ground features across over 1,000 square kilometres, revealing one of history's largest pre-industrial urban areas in a single 11-day aerial campaign.

"We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated."

— Evans et al., PNAS 2013

Thousands of scroll fragments discovered near Qumran since 1947 were too numerous for manual analysis, leaving authorship and dating unresolved for decades. AI handwriting recognition confirmed two scribes wrote the Great Isaiah Scroll, and a Bayesian model redated 135 manuscripts, compressing generations of palaeographic debate into months.

"The results of this study thus dismantle unsubstantiated historical suppositions and chronological limitations, and call into question the validity of the default model's relative typology."

— Popovic et al., PLOS ONE 2025