Science Archaeology This'funny-looking rock' holds 3,000 years of Iron Age secrets Experimenting with copper may have led to our eventual breakthroughs with making iron. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Around 1200 BCE, mankind began its shift away from bronze when a new metal showed its . Iron would eventually become king, but the metal's road to dominance is a bit muddled. Now, a new analysis of a 3,000-year-old smelting workshop in the Eastern European country of Georgia indicates that it was actually copper smelters experimenting with iron-rich rocks that may have sparked iron's rise.

Archeologists at Northern Arizona University (NAU) have taught computers to sort pottery fragments by design and style to assist in classification and reconstruction. A team at NAU's department of anthropology used a form of machine learning known as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to create a computerized method that emulates the thought processes of the human mind when it analyzes visual information to rapidly and consistently sort thousands of pottery designs into categories. CNNs are commonly used in computer image recognition processes like comparing X-rays to medical conditions, matching images in search engines and in self-driving cars. "Now, using digital photographs of pottery, computers can accomplish what used to involve hundreds of hours of tedious, painstaking and eye-straining work by archaeologists who physically sorted pieces of broken pottery into groups, in a fraction of the time and with greater consistency," said study author Leszek Pawlowicz, in a release. The research results are due to be published in the June edition of the Journal of Archeological Science.

These findings are described in the article entitled The quantitative assessment of archaeological artifact groups: Beyond geometric morphometrics, recently published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. This work was conducted by Norman MacLeod from The Natural History Museum, London, University College London, and the Nanjing Institute of Palaeontology and Stratigraphy, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Archaeology is usually defined as the study of human cultural development through the analysis of materials that have been produced by human cultures in both time and space. While the literature devoted to historically-recorded time dwarves that devoted to prehistory, the pre-historical period encompasses over 99 percent of human history. Almost all our understanding of what humans were like, how they lived, where they lived, and what they accomplished during the overwhelming majority of human history comes from their artifacts ( see Figure 1) along with data from comparatively small, but no less important, collections of their skeletal remains.

In addition to seeing the already-explored King's Chamber, and confirming an earlier observation, they also saw a large, nearly 100-meter-long void in the pyramid, isolated from the previously investigated chambers. Its huge size is intriguing to researchers who would like to know more about how the pyramids were constructed. Only fragments of evidence of building techniques remain. It's unclear what the void is, and the researchers are careful not to call it a room or a chamber. As Egyptologist Mark Lehner told multiple outlets including the New York Times, finding holes in a pyramid isn't exactly rare.

A humanoid robotic diver has been developed that scientists and archeologists hope will open up a new realm of deep sea exploration. OceanOne, created by researchers at Stanford University, combines artificial intelligence with human-controlled haptic feedback systems to carry out underwater tasks too dangerous for human divers. Guided by a team of deep-sea archeologists, OceanOne has already been used to investigate the shipwreck of La Lune, the flagship vessel of King Louis XIV that sank in 1664 off the southern coast of France. "OceanOne will be your avatar," said Oussama Khatib, a professor of computer science at Stanford. "The intent here is to have a human diving virtually, to put the human out of harm's way.