Wednesday, May 26, 2021

HIS DARK EMINENCE, BJ'S RICHELIEU

Former Boris Johnson aide gives scathing testimony on U.K.'s early COVID response


Zachary Basu

VIDEO Former Boris Johnson aide gives scathing testimony on U.K.'s early COVID response - Axios

Dominic Cummings, the former chief strategist to U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, delivered bombshell testimony Wednesday on the British government's early response to the coronavirus, apologizing for falling "disastrously short" in a way that cost thousands of lives.

Why it matters:

 Cummings, a controversial figure known as the architect behind the Brexit campaign, has become one of Johnson's most troublesome critics since resigning from government after a bitter power struggle last year.

Cummings has poor public approval and trust ratings — especially after he was accused of breaking the U.K.'s strict COVID lockdown rules last year — but his role as the most powerful aide in Downing Street gave him unique insight into the government's early pandemic response.

The U.K. was one of the worst-hit countries in Europe, both in terms of coronavirus death toll and economic damage, but a world-leading vaccine rollout has brought the country back to the brink of normality.

Highlights:

Cummings testified that in February 2020, Johnson viewed COVID-19 as a "scare story" and suggested that he could have England's chief medical officer inject him with the virus on live television to reassure the public.

Herd immunity — either in September 2020 after a single peak or January 2021 after a second peak — was viewed by the U.K. government as an "inevitability" up until mid-March, Cummings testified. He claimed that the U.K.'s top civil servant even advocated for "chicken pox parties" to get people infected. Downing Street has denied that purposely aiming for herd immunity, which would have resulted in mass death, was ever government policy.

Cummings testified that on March 13, a health department official went to him and said: "I have been told for years there was a plan for this. There is no plan. We are in huge trouble. I think we are absolutely f**ked. I think we are heading for disaster. We are going to kill thousands of people."

Cummings said that Health Secretary Matt Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly." He said he relayed that opinion to Johnson multiple times.

Cummings later claimed that Hancock had "categorically" assured Johnson that people would be tested for COVID-19 before being discharged from hospitals into nursing homes, but that this didn't happen: "Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with COVID back to care homes with COVID."

Despite his outsized role in the Conservative Party's landslide 2019 election victory, Cummings insisted that the choice between Johnson and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn shows that British politics is broken: "Any system which ends up giving a choice of two people like that to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely, badly wrong."

In the sixth hour of his testimony, Cummings confirmed a bombshell BBC report that Johnson privately said last October — after agreeing to a second lockdown — that he'd rather see "bodies pile high" than take the country into a third lockdown. Johnson told Parliament last month that the report was "total, total rubbish."


The other side: 
At Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, which took place as the testimony was ongoing, Johnson denied that the government was ever complacent on COVID and insisted he took "every step" to "minimize the loss of life," in line with the best scientific advice.


Dominic Cummings: Five things he told MPs about Covid response

Dominic Cummings has been speaking to MPs about the UK government's handling of Covid-19.

The former chief aide said Boris Johnson had initially dismissed Covid as a "scare story" and the UK had been too slow to lock down.

Mr Johnson hit back at some of his allegations, insisting that the government's priority had always been to "save lives".

Mr Cummings also suggested that Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been sacked for numerous failings, accusing him of "lying" to people.

A spokesman for Mr Hancock said: “We absolutely reject Mr Cummings' claims about the health secretary."



Dominic Cummings: Thousands died needlessly after Covid mistakes

Published

The PM's former top aide said Boris Johnson was "unfit for the job", claiming he had ignored scientific advice and wrongly delayed lockdowns.

He also claimed Matt Hancock should have been fired for lying - something denied by the health secretary.

"Tens of thousands of people died, who didn't need to die," Mr Cummings added.

At a marathon seven hour evidence session, the former Downing Street insider painted a picture of policy failure, dithering and a government that had no useful plan for handling a pandemic.

He told MPs: "The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this."

He added: "I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that."

Mr Cummings - who was forced out of Number 10 at the end of last year after an internal power struggle - said those on the front line of the pandemic were like "lions" being "led by donkeys".

But he claimed Mr Johnson had told him he liked to be surrounded by "chaos" in Downing Street, because it meant everyone had to look to the PM "to see who is in charge".

Asked if he thought Mr Johnson was a "fit and proper person" to get the UK through the pandemic, Mr Cummings replied: "No."

Mr Johnson hit back at some of his former aide's allegations at Prime Minister's Questions, insisting that the government's priority had always been to "save lives".

But Mr Cummings said that despite nearly losing his own life to Covid, the PM thought the first national lockdown, on 23 March last year, had been a mistake - and he was against a so-called "circuit breaker" lockdown in autumn 2020 for economic reasons, despite scientific advice.

Asked on what basis the PM had taken this decision, Mr Cummings said: "He wasn't taking any advice, he was just taking his own decision that he was going to ignore the advice."

He added: "The cabinet wasn't involved or asked."

Asked if the prime minister had said he would rather see "bodies pile high" than take the country into a third lockdown, as reported by the BBC, Mr Cummings said: "I heard that in the prime minister's study."

Mr Johnson has denied making these comments.

Hancock allegations

The former adviser reserved his most savage criticism for Matt Hancock, claiming the health secretary should have been fired for "15 to 20" different things - accusing him of "criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm".

He said he had repeatedly called on Mr Johnson to sack Mr Hancock, calling him "completely incapable of doing the job".

The prime minister had been furious when he came back to work after recovering from coronavirus to find that untested patients had been discharged to care homes in England, thereby allowing the virus to spread, Mr Cummings claimed.

Both he and the PM had been told "categorically in March that people will be tested before they went back to care homes".

Subsequent government claims about putting a "shield" around care homes were "complete nonsense", he said.

Mr Cummings also attacked Mr Hancock over PPE shortages, and accused him of "disgraceful behaviour" in setting a "stupid" target of offering 100,000 Covid tests a day, which he said had disrupted wider work to establish the test and trace system.

Committee chairman Greg Clark said Mr Cummings must provide written evidence to back up his claims about Mr Hancock, who will be quizzed by the MPs in two weeks' time.

Mr Hancock said he had not seen Mr Cummings' evidence in full adding "instead I've been dealing with getting the vaccination rollout going, especially to over-30s, and saving lives".

However he added that he would have "more to say" when he gives a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday.

Earlier, a spokesman for Mr Hancock said: "We absolutely reject Mr Cummings' claims about the health secretary.

"The health secretary will continue to work closely with the prime minister to deliver the vaccine rollout, tackle the risks posed by variants and support the NHS and social care sector to recover from this pandemic."

Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the "very grave allegations" appeared to be "well-founded" and the health secretary "needs to give us an explanation" if the country is to "maintain confidence in him".

Further claims

In other explosive claims, Mr Cummings said:

  • Mr Johnson initially thought Covid-19 was just a "scare story" and the "new swine flu"
  • The PM had offered to "get (Chief Medical Officer) Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV" to show there was nothing to fear from the virus
  • Mr Johnson had never wanted tougher border controls to prevent the spread of the virus, as he wanted to be like the mayor in film Jaws, who kept beaches open despite the threat of a killer shark

Mr Cummings was questioned by the Health and Science select committees, for their inquiry into "lessons learnt" on the government's response to the pandemic.

Before the hearing began, he tweeted a picture of a whiteboard on which the government's "plan B" for the first wave of the virus was sketched out.

IMAGE COPYRIGHT
 
image captionDominic Cummings has tweeted a series of whiteboard images relating to Covid meetings

He told the MPs the original plan had been for limited intervention, with the hope of achieving "herd immunity", and he was "completely baffled" by Downing Street's denial of this.

He said the herd immunity strategy was abandoned when the scale of the death toll that would result from it became clear.

Barnard Castle

Mr Cummings was frank about some of his own failings - and admitted that his defence of a trip to County Durham during the first lockdown had "undermined public confidence".

But he said he had made the journey due to threats against his family - and he defended his claim that he had driven his family to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight, saying the story was too "weird" to have been made up.

He also gave his version of his departure from Downing Street, saying his relationship with Mr Johnson had broken down after the second national lockdown in October.

"The fact that his girlfriend (Carrie Symonds) also wanted rid of me was relevant but not the heart of the problem," he told MPs.

He said he regarded Mr Johnson as "unfit for the job" and that he had been "trying to create a structure around him (the PM) to try and stop what I thought were extremely bad decisions and push other things through against his wishes".

He also described how a meeting of the government's emergency Cobra committee on 12 March had been disrupted by US President Donald Trump wanting to start a "bombing campaign" against Iraq.

'Save lives'

At the same time, he added, Mr Johnson's partner Carrie Symonds was "going crackers" about a "completely trivial" story in the Times regarding the dog she co-owned with the prime minister.

Responding to Mr Cummings' evidence, Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said: "Boris Johnson's casual disregard for the safety of the British people has had fatal consequences.

"From care homes to borders, repeatedly locking down too late and failing to learn from his mistakes, the PM's decisions and failures resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths."

Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson told MPs: "The handling of this pandemic has been one of the most difficult things this country has had to do for a very long time and none of the decisions have been easy," he said.

"To go into a lockdown is a traumatic thing for a country, to deal with a pandemic on this scale has been appallingly difficult, and we have at every stage tried to minimise loss of life, to save lives, to protect the NHS and we have followed the best scientific advice that we can."

He added that he had not seen Mr Cummings' evidence to the select committee.

Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood defended the prime minister, saying that ministers should be free to speak their minds and even ask "silly questions" without "fear that one day they may be quoted or misquoted back to you".

"That completely diminishes the competence of the No 10 machine," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

More than 127,000 people diagnosed with coronavirus have died in the UK since the start of the pandemic.


BBC


 #NOTOKYOOLYMPICS

Tokyo 2020: Japan's heat will impair Olympic athletes' performance, says report

A thermometer shows the temperature at over 40 degrees during
 a July 2018 media tour at the Japan National Stadium

The impact of climate change will likely lead to "impaired" performances at the Tokyo Olympics, according to a report backed by leading athletes.

In the report, titled Rings of Fire, it is argued that summer heatwaves in Tokyo during the past three years indicate that conditions will be tough.

Concerns over heat have caused the marathon to be moved from Tokyo.

Professor Mike Tipton said he expects Tokyo to be the most "thermally stressful Olympics" of recent times.

The University of Portsmouth professor helped to produce the report, which was backed by athletes, the British Association for Sustainability in Sport (Basis) and scientists from the Priestley International Centre for Climate at Leeds University.

He told BBC Sport: "The take-home message is you've probably got to move the Olympics to a different time of the year rather than a different geographical location or time of the day and I think that's something, going forward, the International Olympic Committee will have to start considering.

"I would be fairly confident to say that performances will be impaired across a lot of sports. The sport as a spectacle will be impaired in terms of the performance level of the people who are doing it."

Mara Yamauchi, who competed in the marathon for Britain at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, backed the report.

She said: "We risk potentially far-reaching consequences for sport as we know it if climate change continues apace.

"We can all do our bit, even in a small way, to mitigate the effects of climate change, and conserve sport and the Olympics in viable forms for future generations."

The Tokyo Games - moved from 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic - are scheduled to run from 23 July to 8 August.

According to the Rings of Fire study, there are concerns about climate In the run-up to the event.

It says the mean annual temperature in the region has risen by 2.86 degrees since 1900 - three times as fast as the world average.

In 2018, a July heatwave was called a natural disaster by Japan's weather agency, while in 2019 more than 5,000 people were hospitalised in around a week because of conditions.

In the study, British triathlete Alistair Brownlee details the dangers of competing in hot conditions.

The 33-year-old says he recalls competing in an event in London in 2010 but cannot remember anything between being 300m from the finish and ending up on an intensive care ward.

In addition, the report highlights that at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha, 28 of the 68 starters in the women's marathon failed to finish because of heat and humidity.

British rower Melissa Wilson added: "We know there'll be muscular and heart impacts of the high heat and so there's that physical impact and we'll see that in terms of the times that athletes go on to achieve.

"If we want to see records, the chances of that will be limited by these intense environmental conditions.

"But also the experience of the athletes trying to deliver your best rowing when somebody has put you in a frying pan is really not pleasant."

Along with the marathon being moved to Sapporo, organisers have looked at other options such as cooling mist machines and surfacing roads along the route with a heat-reducing reflective material.

EU seeks huge fine in court over AstraZeneca vaccine delivery delays 
By Euronews with AP • Updated: 26/05/2021 - 

Lawyer for AstraZeneca Clemence Van Muylder arrives for a hearing, European Commission vs AstraZeneca, at the main courthouse in Brussels, Wednesday, May 26, 2021 - Copyright Virginia Mayo/AP


After months of a bitter dispute over vaccine delivery delays between the European Union and AstraZeneca, a highly publicised trial opened on Wednesday in Brussels.

On this first day, the EU accused the drugmaker of acting in bad faith by providing shots to other nations when it had promised them for urgent delivery to the bloc's 27 member states.

Brussels asked the court to fine AstraZeneca €10 million per infraction and to force the company to pay €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation for breaching the EU contract, while seeking a court order for the urgent delivery of promised jabs.

300 million AstraZeneca jabs were expected by the end of June. But only a third of that will be delivered to Member states.

EU lawyer Rafael Jafferali told the court the company now expects to deliver the total number of doses by the end of December. "With a six-month delay, it's obviously a failure," he said.

'Best reasonable effort'


His main argument is that AstraZeneca should have used production sites in the bloc and the UK for EU supplies as part of a "best reasonable effort'' clause in the contract. He said that 50 million doses that should have been delivered to the EU went to countries outside the bloc instead, "in violation'' of their contract.

The EU legal team also accused the drugmaker of granting preferential treatment to the UK instead of delivering jabs to the EU.


Charles-Edouard Lambert, another lawyer on the EU team, said AstraZeneca decided to reserve production at its Oxford site for Britain. "This is utterly serious. AstraZeneca did not use all the means at its disposal. There is a double standard in the way it treats the UK and member states," he said.

'EU won't be the fall guys' when it comes to vaccines, says France

EU demands AstraZeneca deliver millions of COVID-19 vaccines as promised

Jafferali has said the company should use all four plants listed in their contract for deliveries to the EU. As part of an advanced purchase agreement with vaccine companies, the EU said it invested €2.7 billion, including €336 million, to finance the production of AstraZeneca's serum at the four factories.

He also accused the company of misleading the European Commission by providing data lacking clarity on the delivery delays.

'Groundless accusations'

While the bloc insists AstraZeneca has breached its contractual obligations, the company says it has fully complied with the agreement, arguing that vaccines are difficult to manufacture and it made its best effort to deliver on time.

A lawyer representing AstraZeneca, Hakim Boularbah, said the company's May 2020 agreement with the UK government and Oxford University, the vaccine's co-developer, clearly gave priority to Britain. "It's very shocking to be accused of fraud,'' Boularbah said, calling it "a groundless accusation."

The company's claim that other contractual obligations slowed down the process is one of the legal difficulties in this trial, according to Geerts Van Calster, an EU law professor at KU Leuven University.

"The possibility or not for AstraZeneca to deliver these vaccines depends, of course, on the contractual commitments that they also have with other parties," the legal expert told Euronews.

"And that is a difficult element in this particular procedure because it would probably oblige the judge to look at the content of these other contracts as well. And in fact, the judge, of course, may or may not have access to these contracts," he added.

Following Wednesday's hearing, a second one is slated for Friday. A decision is expected within two to four weeks and can be appealed afterwards.

A long-standing dispute

Amid a deadly surge of coronavirus infections in Europe earlier this year, delays in vaccine production and deliveries hampered the EU's vaccination campaign.

Cheaper and easier to use than rival shots from Pfizer-BioNTech, the AstraZeneca vaccine was a pillar of the EU's vaccine rollout. But the EU's partnership with the firm quickly deteriorated amid accusations it favoured its relationship with British authorities.

While the UK made quick progress in its vaccination campaign thanks to the AstraZeneca shots, the EU faced criticism for its slow start.

What are the real reasons behind France's slow vaccine rollout?

Belgium’s slow rollout ‘absurd’ with so many vaccines made in the country

Concerns over the pace of the rollout across the EU grew after AstraZeneca said it couldn't supply EU members with as many doses as originally anticipated because of production capacity limits.

Improving indicators in Europe


The health situation has dramatically improved in Europe in recent weeks, with the number of COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths on a sharp downward trend as vaccination has picked up.

About 300 million doses of vaccine have been delivered in Europe -- a region with around 450 million inhabitants, with about 245 million already administered.

About 46% of the EU population has had at least one dose.

In total, the European Commission has secured more than 2.5 billion vaccine doses with various manufacturers.

Brussels and Pfizer sign deal for additional 1.8 million COVID-19 vaccine doses

EU seals deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for up to 1.8 billion vaccine doses

It recently sealed another major order with Pfizer and BioNTech through 2023 for an additional 1.8 billion doses of their COVID-19 shot to share between the bloc's countries.
Texas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway

Official's phone logs offer blow-by-blow account of the disaster as it unfolded.


TIM DE CHANT - 5/21/2021, ARS TECHNICA

Enlarge / Icicles hang off the State Highway 195 sign on February 18, 2021, in Killeen, Texas. A winter storm brought historic cold weather and power outages to Texas as storms swept across 26 states with a mix of freezing temperatures and precipitation.
Joe Raedle/Getty 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to 
falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.


Wind turbines were a factor, but only a small one. Wind in Texas doesn’t produce as much power in the winter, and regulators don’t typically rely on wind turbines to provide significant amounts of power. Instead, regulators anticipated that natural gas and coal power plants would meet demand.

In public, Bill Magness, then-CEO of ERCOT, the state’s electric grid regulator, didn’t seem concerned about the approaching weather. In a virtual meeting on February 9, Magness said, “As those of you in Texas know, we do have a cold front coming this way... Operations has issued an operating condition notice just to make sure everyone is up to speed with their winterization and we’re ready for the several days of pretty frigid temperatures to come our way.” During the two-and-a-half-hour public portion of the meeting, Magness devoted just 40 seconds to the unusual weather.

Early signs


The first sign of trouble came the next day, when Magness, concerned that supply wouldn’t match demand, asked customers to conserve energy. Later that day, Walker took a call from officials at energy provider Vistra Corporation, which told her that several of its power plants had received notices that natural gas supplies would be curtailed.

Curtailing the flow of gas usually happens when cold weather increases demand or damages infrastructure. In Texas, both happened. The higher demand could be anticipated, but the problems with the natural gas infrastructure, detailed in a US Department of Energy situation report, were particularly troubling. Wellheads were “freezing off,” and gas processing facilities were dropping offline due to the cold weather, sharply reducing production that would feed the region’s pipelines.

Walker noted her call with Vistra in her diary and phone log for February 10-19, which she produced at the behest of the State Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. The document provides a striking blow-by-blow account of what was happening behind the scenes as bitter winter weather brought down Texas’ grid. “I received information from Vistra Corporation that they had received notices of gas curtailments at several power plants. I notified the Governor’s office and Chairman Hancock about the information from Vistra,” she wrote, referring to State Senator Kelly Hancock, chair of the committee.

Also on February 10, Walker followed up with the chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, the regulator that oversees gas pipelines, and the leadership of the Texas House and Senate to inform them of the impending problem. She also spoke with utilities and power companies, as well as their major customers. “I began discussions with representatives of the Texas Industrial Electric Consumers, in an attempt to resolve concerns that the gas curtailment issues could raise with electric generators. I spoke with representative of generators about the impact the gas curtailment would have on generation and began discussions with the various parties to resolve those concerns,” she wrote.

Gas curtailments dominated Walker’s schedule for the next three days.

Grid collapse

On February 12, the Railroad Commission issued an emergency order dictating which customers should be prioritized for natural gas deliveries, and late on February 14, Texas’ grid finally began collapsing. In two text messages sent around midnight, ERCOT chief Magness told Walker that some wind turbines had frozen and several fossil fuel generators had tripped offline. Blackouts began just before 2 am, February 15. Walker promptly notified the governor’s office.Advertisement

That was the only time Walker’s diary or logs mention wind power. After the two late-night text messages from Magness, Walker’s report does not mention wind power again. But it does reference gas curtailments more than 70 times over the next four days, a possible reflection of the scope, severity, and impact of the shortages.

The power outages soon found their way back to natural gas suppliers. “The concerns related to natural gas moved from concerns about curtailment to concerns about electric outages for gas producers,” Walker wrote on February 15. Power plants, short on gas, couldn’t generate enough electricity to power the infrastructure that kept gas flowing from suppliers to users, including the power plants themselves. It created a feedback loop that compounded the problem further. “I met with and informed the office of the Governor about the situation,” Walker wrote. “I interacted throughout the day with ERCOT and the Governor’s office related to the ongoing issues.”

Between when the outages began and when Abbott appeared on Fox host Sean Hannity’s show on February 16, Walker had spoken with the governor’s office more than 50 times. By this time, natural gas production in the South Central US, which includes Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas, was down 30 percent, representing a loss of 7 percent of all US production.

Continued blackouts


Over the next three days, blackouts plagued the state. According to Walker’s logs, Samsung’s fab outside of Austin shut down on the morning of February 16. The facility lost 71,000 wafers to the disruption, costing the company at least $268 million. It took Samsung more than a month to bring it back online. Power was cut to NXP’s fab the next day. The company also lost a month of production, and it estimated that the outage cost it $100 million.

FURTHER READING  Minnesotans furious that they have to pay for Texas’ deep-freeze problems

The same day that NXP’s fab was shut down, Abbott ordered natural gas producers to halt exports and sell to power plants in an effort to get them running again.

As the cold weather continued, millions remained without power, some for days. Pipes burst, flooding customers' homes and forcing them to look elsewhere for fresh water. Chemical plants and fuel refineries spewed tons of toxic pollutants into the air as they executed emergency shutdowns. The effects of the gas shortage were felt as far north as Minnesota. According to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, 151 people died of causes related to the disaster.
Archaeologists train a neural network to sort pottery fragments for them

The network turned out to be as good at the job as human archaeologists.


KIONA N. SMITH - 5/21/2021


Pawlowicz and Downum 2021

Real archaeological fieldwork is seldom as exciting as it looks in the movies. You tend to get fewer reanimated mummies, deadly booby traps, and dramatic shootouts with Nazis. Instead, you'll see pieces of broken pottery—a lot of them. Potsherds are ubiquitous at archaeological sites, and that's true for pretty much every culture since people invented pottery. In the US Southwest in particular, museums have collected sherds by the tens of thousands.

Although all those broken bits may not look like much at first glance, they’re often the key to piecing together the past.

“[Potsherds] provide archaeologists with critical information about the time a site was occupied, the cultural group with which it was associated, and other groups with whom they interacted,” said Northern Arizona University archaeologist Chris Downum, who co-authored a new study with Leszek Pawlowicz.

Members of different cultures have always made their own container types, using their own techniques and decorating in their own ways. And within each culture, those styles and techniques have changed over time. That’s why archaeologists can often look at a site’s potsherds to tell who lived there and how long ago. They’re what archaeologists call diagnostic artifacts.

But getting that information requires sorting and classifying the potsherds, usually based on the small details of how they’re made or decorated. At some sites, archaeologists in the lab find themselves sorting hundreds or even thousands of potsherds. It’s “hundreds of hours of tedious, painstaking, eye-straining work,” as Pawlowicz put it, and it can take years to learn to do it reliably and well. Even then, archaeologists don’t always agree on what’s what, which can impact how they tell the story of the past.

A high-tech matching game

Pawlowicz and Downum recently turned to machine-learning for a faster way to sort through all those mountains of potsherds.

Between 825 and 1300 CE, people living in the canyons and mesas of northeast Arizona stored their food and water in hand-shaped containers that were elaborately decorated with dark brown or black geometric patterns on a white background. Today, we know these artisans as the Kayenta Branch of the Ancestral Pueblo culture—a group of indigenous Americans who were the ancestors of the modern Hopi people. Their pottery, now called Tusayan White Ware, varied over time and between places, and archaeologists have sorted it further into a handful of smaller categories.

That’s exactly what Pawlowicz and Downum asked four experienced archaeologists to do with 3,000 potsherd photos taken at museums in northeastern Arizona. The pieces that archaeologists agreed came from a specific subtype (roughly 2,400 of them) became the dataset used to train a computer program called a Convolutional Neural Network, or CNN. Sometimes the images were randomly shrunk, enlarged, or rotated to ensure that the program could deal with those variations.

CNNs have been used to sort through image search results or look for signs of pathology in medical X-ray images. CNNs are good at analyzing visual information. Show one enough labeled pictures of dogs, for instance, and it will eventually learn to tell the difference between a beagle and a mastiff.

When pitted against the four expert archaeologists in a final potsherd sorting showdown, the neural network outperformed two of the humans and tied with the other two.

The experiment’s result suggests that neural networks may be useful tools for future archaeologists, especially if there is a lot of potsherd sorting to get done. And it’s not the first result of its kind; a different team of archaeologists trained a CNN to sort medieval French potsherds based on 3D scans, and the program was about 96 percent accurate. That’s not an improvement over human accuracy, but it could offer a more efficient way to deal with the sheer number of potsherds some sites offer up.Advertisement

“This will free up time and effort for archaeologists to concentrate on the meaning of the results,” wrote Pawlowicz and Downum.

Someday, the researchers suggest, a mobile or web application could connect archaeologists in the field or the lab to a CNN that could classify potsherd photos on the fly, link to similar sherds, and even offer metadata about the site. That, of course, would depend on convincing archaeologists to upload their own photos and data to the central database for everyone’s benefit—which may be harder than programming and training the neural networks.

Proof of concept


For now, Pawlowicz and Downum’s recent study is a proof of concept. They chose a pottery type, Tusayan White Ware, that is especially easy for a computer to sort based on photos, because its patterns contrast so strongly with the background. A neural network would likely do reasonably well at sorting other types of decorated pottery, but so-called plainware—ceramics without any visible decoration or markings—would probably be a bridge too far.

There are some things humans may always do better than any of our electronic creations. On the other hand, neural networks do have some advantages. Archaeologists arguing about potsherd classifications often struggle to explain why they’ve put a potsherd in a particular category, for example.

“An archaeologist experienced in decorated ceramics is often capable of assigning a type to a sherd in a fraction of a second, without consciously thinking of all the design rules for that type,” wrote Pawlowicz and Downum. Their CNN, on the other hand, color-coded specific features on the photos that explained its choices. By combining that ability with the more intuitive work of human archaeologists, future work could help sort out some artifacts that might otherwise go unclassified.

In other words, the tedious and meticulous work of sorting potsherds may one day be a joint effort between people and our most advanced artifacts.

Journal of Archaeological Science, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2021.105375; (About DOIs).