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Mysterious stone spheres could be remnants of an ancient board game played across Aegean and Mediterranean settlements thousands of years ago, according to an analysis helped by artificial intelligence.

鈥淪imilar stones have been discovered in Crete, in other Aegean islands, in Cyprus,鈥� says at the University of Bristol in the UK. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e all coming out of excavations and people are always puzzled about what the stones are.鈥�

To weigh the evidence for competing theories about the stones鈥� purpose, Trimmis and , also at the University of Bristol, trained artificial intelligence to search for common features among 679 spherical stones discovered at the site of a Bronze Age settlement called Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini. The stones, which are between about 3600 and nearly 4500 years old, are slightly smaller, on average, than golf balls and consist of many different stone materials.

The AI categorised them into two main groups: larger, naturally round stones and smaller ones that showed signs of having been worked by humans into a spherical shape. 鈥淚 just don鈥檛 think we would have been able to pick up the patterns in such a way [without machine learning],鈥� says Fernee.

The classification generally rules out one of two main theories 鈥� that the stones were used in an ancient counting system. That鈥檚 because known examples of counting systems usually have many groups of differently sized stones to signify different numerical values.

Instead, the two categories favour a competing theory about the stones being playing pieces in an ancient board game. Many ancient Aegean settlements, including Akrotiri, also contain stone slabs with rows of shallow cup marks that could have held small, round gaming pieces, says Vassiliki Pliatsika at the National Archaeological Museum in Greece who was not part of the team.

The next step for Trimmis and Fernee involves scanning and digitally modelling the cup marks found on such stone slabs so that additional AI analysis could help find patterns between the marks and the stone spheres. The researchers are also planning a 2023 expedition to the island of Crete to check out more samples.

It is important to see if such future research can find connections between the possible gaming pieces and gaming boards, says at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. 鈥淭here are also other kinds of games that could hypothetically be played with these objects that don鈥檛 require a board,鈥� he says.

Archaeologists have often overlooked board gaming in favour of explanations involving religious rituals or counting and weighing systems. 鈥淭his creates a false image of the people and cultures of the Bronze Age Aegean appearing not interested in gaming,鈥� says Pliatsika. She added that the study鈥檚 AI analysis 鈥渕ay be applied in several Bronze Age Aegean contexts to provide much needed evidence to identify board gaming practices鈥�.