LIDAR reveals an 11-kilometre lost Mayan causeway under the Petén canopy

Three months of airborne LIDAR over the Petén basin in Guatemala has resolved 11.4 km of paved sacbé connecting two minor Classic-period centres to Tikal. The data passes that produced the result, the vegetation-filter parameters that almost hid it, and what comes next.

2026-05-22 lidartikalmayafieldworkguatemalaphotogrammetry

Training a transformer on Linear B: what 1,427 tablets do and don't teach a 90-million-parameter model

A small transformer trained from scratch on the Mycenaean Linear B corpus produces three credible readings for an undeciphered fragment of the KN Fp series. The model is wrong in interesting ways. Here's the architecture, the training data, and what the failures tell us about epigraphy.

2026-05-11 transformerlinear-bmycenaeanepigraphydecodingknossos

Walking through the Karnak hypostyle hall in VR: what the model gets right, and what it can't

A 134-pillar VR reconstruction of the Karnak hypostyle hall, built from 47,000 photogrammetric source images and the Ramessid-era polychromy survey, is now running at 90 Hz on a Quest 3. The mesh is faithful to within 4 mm. The lighting is the open question — and it is a harder question than the geometry.

2026-05-04 vrphotogrammetrykarnakegyptreconstructionpolychromy

The ethics of digitally reconstructing destroyed heritage

When the Umayyad Mosque minaret in Aleppo was reduced to rubble in 2013, photogrammetric models were our last record of what stood there. We can rebuild it in a renderer to sub-centimetre accuracy. Whether we should — and on whose authority — is a question the technology will not answer for us.

2026-04-30 ethicsreconstructionaleppopalmyraheritagephotogrammetry

A photogrammetry workflow for fragile manuscripts that won't touch the page

Most photogrammetric documentation pipelines assume an object that can be moved. Bound or charred manuscripts cannot. The workflow we have settled on at the Bodleian — sub-millimetre mesh density without a single page-turn — relies on a turntable that never moves the page, a calibrated 60 megapixel camera, and a quiet patience with Agisoft Metashape.

2026-04-18 manuscriptphotogrammetrymetashapebodleianconservationpreservation

What we found inside a sealed Roman amphora at Boscoreale using XRF

Fourteen unopened Dressel 2-4 amphorae from the Villa della Pisanella at Boscoreale were probed with portable X-ray fluorescence in March. The residue chemistry inside one of them is not wine. It is, almost certainly, garum — and that has consequences for what the cellar was actually for.

2026-04-04 xrfpompeiiboscorealeamphoragarumchemistry

Which file formats are still going to be readable in 2076?

Long-term digital preservation is not a software problem, it is a format problem. Here is the working table the Sydney lab uses when we choose what to write our archaeological data into — and the four formats we have stopped using entirely since 2023.

2026-03-14 preservationfile-formatsarchivestiffplyjpeg-2000

Welcome to Digital Relics — a magazine of computational archaeology, written from the field

A short editorial note on what this publication is, what it isn't, and what to expect — written for archaeologists, conservators, programmers and the curious.

2024-07-29 editorialintroductionaboutthissite