Members of the ‘DarkAegean’ project (I+D project ‘The agricultural economy of the Aegean ‘Dark Ages’ through machine learning-powered 3D cereal grain morphometrics, PID2022-139907NB-I00) have been carrying out experimental charring of cereal grains collected after harvesting the experimental cultivation fields at Thermi, Thessalonikis, in Greece. The fields were tended at ELGO-DEMETER under the supervision of Dr Ioannis Mylonas and his team. The ‘DarkAegean’ team after having successfully developed an algorithm to predict the agricultural parameters of experimentally grown grains (Orengo et al. 2026), is now testing the effect of charring on the cereals. This has been a trickier task than originally thought but good progress is being made!
Above and below you have some snapshots of Dr Theoni Baniou and Paloma Aliende hard at work!
Orengo, H.A., Berganzo-Besga, I., Esmoris, J., Lumbreras, F., Aliende, P., Wallace, M., Livarda, A. 2026. High-Performance 3D Morphometrics via Deep Learning and Tabular Foundational Models: a case study on complex cereal grain classification. Journal of Archaeological Science 191: 106607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2026.106607
