S.C. archaeology project receives Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded a $320,000, two-year grant to support a collaborative project between the South Carolina Heritage Trust Program and the University of South Carolina. The project, “SnowVision: A Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tool for the Study of Cultural Heritage Collections,” will facilitate the expansion and extension of a set of tools designed to assist scholars with identifying and classifying design motifs on artifacts.

“This is an incredibly impressive grant,” said Ken Rentiers, deputy director for the Land, Water and Conservation Division of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR), of which the Heritage Trust Program is a part. “This collaborative project has the potential to impact Native American research across a two-thousand-year period.”

A collaborative project between SCDNR Heritage Trust program archaeologists and University of South Carolina computer scientists has enormous potential to help researchers better understand the artifacts left by Native American civilizations in South Carolina and elsewhere.