Field Survey & Excavation

SCARI's fieldwork follows established professional standards for pedestrian survey, site recording, and excavation. Our team has extensive experience in remote, off-trail environments—from coastal bluffs to desert washes—where many of Southern California's most significant sites remain under-documented.

All field data is recorded using standardized forms and integrated into our digital archive for cross-referencing with existing site records and published literature.

Digital Archive & Data Automation

At the core of SCARI's research infrastructure is a locally hosted, searchable archive of over 2,000 archaeological publications. This archive is maintained on dedicated hardware with full-text indexing, automated classification, and citation cross-referencing capabilities.

Our data pipeline automates the most time-consuming aspects of literature review: ingesting new publications, extracting metadata, classifying papers by topic and region, and identifying connections across the existing corpus. This allows our researchers to focus on interpretation rather than data management.

AI-Assisted Literature Analysis

SCARI employs locally hosted large language models—running entirely on private hardware with no cloud dependencies—for systematic literature analysis. Our primary research associate, Aurelius, operates on a custom-configured AI system optimized for archaeological text comprehension.

Key capabilities include:

• Thematic synthesis across hundreds of publications
• Identification of under-cited or overlooked sources relevant to active research questions
• Draft preparation of literature reviews and research syntheses
• Multi-faceted taxonomy classification of new acquisitions

All AI-generated analysis is subject to review, verification, and editorial oversight by SCARI's principal investigator. AI tools at SCARI augment human expertise—they do not replace it.

Independent Peer Review System

Before any SCARI paper is published, it undergoes review by Hypatia—an independent AI peer reviewer running on a separate model and hardware from the drafting system. This architectural separation ensures that the reviewer has no shared context or bias with the author.

Hypatia's reviews evaluate methodological soundness, argument coherence, citation completeness, and identify relevant literature from the archive that may strengthen or challenge the paper's conclusions. This process mirrors traditional peer review while leveraging the speed and thoroughness of computational analysis.

Custom Applications

SCARI is developing specialized tools for the broader archaeological community, including an AI-powered historic artifact identification system designed to assist field archaeologists with rapid, in-field classification. Details on these tools will be published as they reach production readiness.