Play. Learn. Help Archaeology through Archaeotag

Help us see the past, one artefact at a time.

Archaeological archives hold hundreds of thousands of photographs of objects – pottery sherds, metal tools, bones, beads, fragments whose stories are waiting to be told. Each image carries information that could help researchers find patterns across sites, centuries, and collections. But there’s a problem: there are far too many images for archaeologists to describe by hand, and computers still struggle to make sense of a chipped rim or a half-buried find on their own.

That’s where you come in.

In just a few seconds per image, you can tell us what you see. Is the object whole, or is it a fragment? Can you recognise what it is? Is it damaged? What angle is it photographed from – and is there a scale bar or colour reference in the frame? You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t even need to know what the object is. Your eyes are doing something computers find genuinely hard: spotting, at a glance, the simple visual facts that turn a pile of pictures into searchable, usable data.

Every tag you add helps in two ways. It makes these collections easier for researchers to navigate and reuse – and it teaches machines to do better, by giving computer-vision models the human-labelled examples they need to learn from. You’re not just sorting photos; you’re helping build the foundations of open, AI-assisted archaeology.

Ready to dig in?