An OU researcher has won a $50,000 grant to test a new technique that may unlock secrets of how some ancient societies around the world lived.

The technique uses automated software to analyze high-resolution photos of pottery shards to yield data in minutes while current techniques require hours of tedious work from highly trained specialists.

Anthropologist Patrick Livingood, the researcher who designed the process, said scientists study ancient pottery because it is usually the most abundant artifact prehistoric people leave behind.

“Before people made pottery, stone tools were usually the most abundant artifact we have,” he said. “Later on, when people start making pottery, the pottery preserves really well. ... We are able to use it to say a great deal about people.”

Livingood said the system will allow archaeologists to more cheaply and efficiently study certain aspects of ancient life in more detail than current technology allows. With tens of millions of pieces of ancient ceramic pottery around the world, Livingood’s technique could allow scientists to re-examine cataloged artifacts from previous archaeological discoveries.

“Essentially this will just lower the cost of something archaeologists have been doing for a long time,” he said. “You’ve got this huge pile of pottery [and with] the techniques that archaeologists use, there’s not much more that we can say about them, and so what this does is let us look at another dimension of ancient behavior.”

Specifically, he said, archaeologists may be able to learn about details as varying as tribal lineage, trade relations or ritual practices.

But the technique is still unproven, so Livingood applied for the grant from a division of the National Park Service to fund a year-long test run on artifacts from a site in northern Arkansas that was inhabited about 1,200 years ago by the ancestors of the Quapaw Tribe.

His proposal beat out 60 others for one of only a handful of awards. The money will go toward purchasing equipment and paying researchers.

Livingood’s team will study a site known as the Moon Site, which holds as many as 25,000 pieces of pottery. Livingood said he plans to conduct his testing with a small group of student researchers.

To check the quality of the results, random samples from the collection will be tested using the traditional method.

“There’s a potential that applying this to the Moon Site could say something very interesting,” he said. “There’s simply things that you can’t answer in any other way.”