Lorenzo Cardarelli

Lorenzo Cardarelli

Archaeological pottery documentation traditionally requires a time-consuming manual process of converting pencil sketches into publication-ready inked drawings. I present PyPotteryInk, an open-source automated pipeline that transforms archaeological pottery sketches into standardised publication-ready drawings using a one-step diffusion model. Built on a modified img2img-turbo architecture, the system processes drawings in a single forward pass while preserving crucial morphological details and maintaining archaeologic documentation standards and analytical value. The model employs an efficient patch-based approach with dynamic overlap, enabling high-resolution output regardless of input drawing size. I demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on a dataset of Italian protohistoric pottery drawings, where it successfully captures both fine details like decorative patterns and structural elements like vessel profiles or handling elements. Expert evaluation confirms that the generated drawings meet publication standards while significantly reducing processing time from hours to seconds per drawing. The model can be fine-tuned to adapt to different archaeological contexts with minimal training data, making it versatile across various pottery documentation styles. The pre-trained models, the Python library and comprehensive documentation are provided to facilitate adoption within the archaeological research community.

Lorenzo Cardarelli

Archaeological pottery documentation and study represents a crucial but time-consuming aspect of archaeology. While recent years have seen advances in digital documentation methods, vast amounts of legacy data remain locked in traditional publications. This paper introduces PyPotteryLens, an open-source framework that leverages deep learning to automate the digitisation and processing of archaeological pottery drawings from published sources. The system combines state-of-the-art computer vision models (YOLO for instance segmentation and EfficientNetV2 for classification) with an intuitive user interface, making advanced digital methods accessible to archaeologists regardless of technical expertise. The framework achieves over 97\% precision and recall in pottery detection and classification tasks, while reducing processing time by up to 5x to 20x compared to manual methods. Testing across diverse archaeological contexts demonstrates robust generalisation capabilities. Also, the system's modular architecture facilitates extension to other archaeological materials, while its standardised output format ensures long-term preservation and reusability of digitised data as well as solid basis for training machine learning algorithms. The software, documentation, and examples are available on GitHub (https://github.com/lrncrd/PyPottery/tree/PyPotteryLens).