Patterns of a Life and Death through Machine Learning: Archives of the Bois Marchand Cemetery in Mauritius

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Bois Marchand cemetery in Mauritius was established in 1867, during the malaria epidemic, as the largest in the Indian Ocean and the third largest in the world. The Bois Marchand Cemetery Archive (1867–to date) holds a near-complete set of burial records of individuals interred in this cemetery. The records contain personal information of the deceased, from their names, sex, and place of birth to their date, place, and cause of death, and the date and type of burial, and provide a unique repository of demographic and disease data. We are making this information computationally usable with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. AI technologies, such as machine learning, are transforming how archival data is processed and analyzed. Machine learning algorithms can be trained to recognize patterns and make predictions based on the given data. This paper will present our work and some of these patterns.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39628.0