University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Humanities Sgoil nan Daonnachdan - Latest News - PhD studentship: Automation in the practice of archaeological survey

Thanks to AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership funding held jointly by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and the University of Glasgow, we are offering a 45 month (3.75 years) PhD scholarship on developing approaches to integrate automation-led detection routines into workflows used in the professional practice of archaeological prospection and landscape archaeology, notably for large scale heritage management. The supervisors will be Dr Rachel Opitz (Archaeology) and Dr Jan Paul Siebert (Computer Science) at University of Glasgow, and Dr Lukasz Banaszek and Mr David Cowley (HES). Automated detection routines have been viewed as potentially useful or even transformative for several decades, and recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) based in machine learning and computer vision has moved these approaches from potentially interesting to practically implementable across a variety of applications. Within archaeology, the potential of AI-led approaches and heavily automated image processing for partially automating the identification of archaeological features and landscape changes has been demonstrated in several studies. Their implementation has brought measurable benefits, leading to increased investment in their development. While the technologies themselves are being pursued, less attention has been paid to the analytical and interpretive frameworks within which semi-automated computational approaches to feature identification, notably AIs, are integrated into practices of archaeological landscape interpretation, particularly within heritage management bodies.