Cosmos Magazine reports that Daryl Wesley of Flinders University and Mimal and
Marrku Traditional Owners of the Wilton River area used machine learning to analyze
changes in rock art styles in northern Australia’s Arnhem Land. The computer was
supplied with information of more than 1,000 types of objects and a mathematical model
to determine how similar two images are to one another. The model was then applied to
images of the rock art. “One amazing outcome is that the machine learning approach
ordered the styles in the same chronology that archaeologists have ordered them in by
inspecting which appear on top of which,” said team member Jarrad Kowlessar of
Flinders University. Styles of artwork that are closer to each other in age are also closer
to each other in appearance, he explained. The team members suggest that this approach takes tiny details easily missed by humans into account, and removes possible human bias from the evaluation of rock art sites