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🏺 Digitizing Pottery Documentation
PyPottery brings the traditional archaeological pottery documentation workflow into the digital age. Each manual step in the classical process finds its digital counterpart in our suite of specialized tools.
The Traditional Workflow
Archaeological pottery documentation has followed a well-established workflow for decades. From initial scanning of pottery plates to the creation of publication-ready layouts, each step requires specialized skills and significant time investment.
PyPottery automates and enhances each of these steps, allowing researchers to focus on interpretation rather than repetitive manual tasks.
From Manual to Digital
Every traditional step has its PyPottery equivalent
Manual tracing of pottery drawings on transparent paper, inking outlines, and creating clean reproducible illustrations.
AI-powered inking. Enhance drawings in seconds.
Manually arranging pottery drawings on plates, ensuring consistent scaling and professional presentation for publication.
Automatic layout generation with consistent scaling and publication-ready exports in PDF and SVG formats.
PyPotteryLens — Extract from Publications
Already have published PDFs? Extract pottery images directly from existing documents using computer vision, then process them through the PyPottery pipeline.
Why PyPottery?
Save Time
What takes hours manually can be done in minutes. Process hundreds of drawings in batch mode.
Consistent Quality
AI models ensure uniform results across your entire corpus. No more variations between different operators.
Reproducible
Every step is documented and reproducible. Share your workflow parameters with colleagues.
Open Source
Free to use, modify, and extend. Built by archaeologists, for archaeologists.
Get Started
Ready to transform your pottery documentation workflow?
- Check the Requirements to ensure your system is compatible
- Choose your starting point based on your needs:
- Have published PDFs? → Start with PyPotteryLens
- Have digital drawings to enhance? → Start with PyPotteryInk
- Have published PDFs? → Start with PyPotteryLens
- Follow the tool-specific guides for detailed instructions
☕ Support This Project
If you find PyPottery useful for your research, consider supporting its development. Your support helps maintain and improve this open-source tool for the archaeological community!
Every contribution, no matter how small, makes a difference! 🙏