This study explores the application of supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms for predicting the sex of sheep using measurements of the talus bone in archaeozoological research. Leveraging data from well-documented sheep populations, we trained and tested various machine learning algorithms, such as kNN, SVMs, Decision Trees, Neural Networks, k-Means, DBSCAN, and GMM – demonstrating high accuracy in sex classification across multiple datasets from various time periods. We furthermore evaluate a variety of clustering results on unlabeled data and highlight their respective strengths and drawbacks. Our results suggest that machine learning offers a promising direction for enhancing the analysis of ancient and recent animal remains, providing valuable insights into past animal husbandry practices and their implications for understanding human history.

We tasked two supervised keypoint detection networks to automatically identify anatomically relevant landmarks on sheep bones. The results of the models were compared to manual labeling by a domain expert, yielding satisfactory initial results that provide a promising foundation for further research.

This demo describes the OSSOBOOK database system developed for archaeozoology applications providing data storage, data retrieval, and data mining facilities. It shows a case study of integrating state-of-the-art database concepts like intermittently synchronized database system as well as concepts of information retrieval and knowledge representation like similarity search and data mining in order to provide a comprehensive system for an interesting application domain.