Software engineer uses AI to search historical archives, finding forgotten meteors, rhinos and volcanic eruptions

Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more

A software engineer used AI to search millions of pages of historical archives, turning up a meteorite report, shipping records for 3 rhinos and 3 candidate volcanic eruption records. The pipeline combines semantic search, Jev for first-pass filtering, Claude Haiku for close reading and Claude Code to check the original scans, and was tested against known historical events. The main findings were checked against original pages and accessible catalogs, but no relevant expert has reviewed them yet. The author is open-sourcing the investigation workflow as the Antiquity toolkit.

Why it matters: A software engineer chains semantic search, low-cost model filtering and original-scan verification, then tests the pipeline on known events, offering a transferable method for large-scale archive research.