Shafaq News/ Archeologists at the University of Bologna have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to unveil hidden treasures of antiquity, breathing new life into the rich narrative tapestry of human history.

The team has developed an innovative system of AI algorithms specifically engineered to discover previously unidentified archaeological sites within the southern expanse of the Mesopotamian plain.

Artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning algorithms, has increasingly become a versatile tool across numerous fields of application. In the realm of archaeology, it exhibits an unrivaled ability to categorize artefacts and text, identify patterns, construct detailed 3D models, and more vitally, pinpoint prospective archaeological sites.

The promising utility of this AI system was substantiated through a pilot test conducted in Iraq's Maysan southern governorate. The algorithm's adeptness was strikingly remarkable, accurately detecting sites of archaeological interest with a precision of 80 percent.

As reported in the journal Scientific Reports, the study's revelations underscored an endemic issue: the monumental amount of resources and effort needed to sift through and analyze the sheer volume of archived satellite images. Nevertheless, the introduction of an automated AI system would drastically attenuate the time and resource investment necessary for this endeavor.

As the authors elucidated in their study, "this process resides within the sphere of Remote Sensing (RS) which pertains to the act of discerning and/or monitoring a point of interest remotely. Given the increasingly sophisticated imagery provided by satellites, this practice has proven to be an indispensable asset in contemporary archaeology."

To achieve their ground-breaking results, the team utilized a dataset of vector shapes which symbolized the archaeologically recognized sites within the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. Leveraging pre-trained models for semantic segmentation that were refined through exposure to satellite imagery, along with masks of the site shapes, they meticulously designed a system capable of accurately discerning and outlining sites.

The authors of the study noted, "the potential applications of this technique extend far beyond its rapidity; it should primarily be considered a crucial adjunct to traditional expert-based photointerpretation. In numerous instances, it can enrich the latter by detecting site features that might otherwise be overlooked, but likely carry considerable significance."

Mesopotamia, according to Britannica, encompasses the region situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, north or northwest of the pinch point in modern-day Baghdad, Iraq. However, the term has been expansively used to denote the area bordered on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and the southwest by the fringe of the Arabian Plateau, extending from the Arab Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest.