Can Stones be Made (Artificially) Intelligent? A Pilot Study for AI-based Repeated Pattern Detection of Architectural Decoration in Roman Asia Minor
Verlinden, Julie, Mahieu, Thorsten, Goedemé, Toon · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2025
The disciplines of History, Archaeology and Computer Vision have each stimulated the development and use of diverse digital tools within their own domain. But what if we dare to ask a research question positioned right at the crossroad of these fields, necessitating the computer-based analysis of people’s past via both inscriptions and monuments? In this paper we return to the dawn of our era (1st century BCE - 3rd CE) in the historical region of Asia Minor (roughly modern-day Turkey) to put this to the test. Our starting point? The many legacy photographs of so called Bauornamented buildings. With the help of pattern recognition techniques, we attempted to design a (proof-of-concept) AI-algorithm capable of detecting and segmenting the various complex designs in pictures of such embellished building blocks. In doing so, we focused on mitigating the bottlenecks of the traditional time-consuming manual comparative approaches, allowing to unlock this data’s true historical potential.