Dr Daniël van Helden is Postdoctoral Research Associate on the EU funded AUTOMATA Project (AUTOMated enriched digitisation of Archaeological liThics and cerAmics) in the Department of Mathematics, King's College London. Daan holds a PhD in Roman Archaeology from the University of Leicester. Though an archaeologist by training, he has always been maths-curious. On the AUTOMATA Project, he combines the two disciplines of archaeology and artificial intelligence. On the one hand he is developing AI tools to help automate recording and collating of the many different kinds of data from the diverse range of archaeological artefacts that the project deals with as well as for classifying those same artefacts. On the other, he provides domain-specific knowledge to interpret the results and finetune the process in archaeologically informed ways.

Research interests

• AI and archaeology
• Maths and archaeology
• The epistemological status of archaeological knowledge
• Fiction and empathy as archaeological method