Improving micromorphological analysis with CNN-based segmentation of flint/obsidian, bone and charcoal

Abstract

The quantification and identification of components in archaeological micromorphology remain subjective and challenging, particularly for early-career researchers. To address this, we developed a deep learning tool for the automatic segmentation of three materials commonly found in Palaeolithic contexts and thin sections: bone, charcoal, and lithic fine-grained debitage (flint and obsidian). Using high-resolution photomicrographs of 57 thin sections in plane-polarised and cross-polarised light, we trained and evaluated state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for material segmentation. The best-performing configuration, a U-Net with an InceptionV4 encoder, achieved mean intersection over union (IoU) scores of 0.96 for flint/obsidian, 0.80 for bone, and 0.82 for charcoal. The models also classified the relative abundance of each material with balanced accuracies of 0.99 for flint/obsidian, 0.92 for bone, and 0.85 for charcoal. These results demonstrate the potential of deep learning to enhance objectivity, accuracy, and reproducibility in archaeological micromorphology, providing a valuable resource for future geoarchaeological research.