Archaeologists working with pottery spend a considerable amount of time on a fundamental task – providing precise descriptions of pottery fragments. This study presents a survey of existing computational solutions to identify the best matches for a given fragment, based on its shape. Four methods (ICP, DCT, RDP, and RTC) are compared, using a pottery dataset from Graufesenque (southern France), dated to the Roman Period. The first three methods produced successful and very similar results for rim fragments (within the five best candidates for 95% of the dataset). The ICP algorithm produced the best overall results for rim fragments, and can also be used for non-rim fragments. A practical computer application, including all the above methods, was developed in R programming language, with an easy-to-use graphical interface, and is now made freely available to the archaeological community for future studies, and further development.

从事考古工作的考古学家将大量时间花费在一项基本任务上–提供对陶器碎片的精确描述。这项研究提出了对现有计算解决方案的调查，以根据给定片段的形状确定给定片段的最佳匹配。比较了四种方法（ICP，DCT，RDP和RTC），方法是使用来自Graufesenque（法国南部）的，可追溯到罗马时期的陶瓷数据集。前三种方法对轮辋片段产生了成功且非常相似的结果（在95％的数据集的五个最佳候选者之内）。ICP算法对于轮辋片段产生了最佳的整体结果，也可以用于非轮辋片段。使用R编程语言开发了一种实用的计算机应用程序，其中包括上述所有方法，并具有易于使用的图形界面，