I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Historical Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorite, Lost Rhinos, and Unrecorded Volcanic Eruptions.
Summary
A software engineer documents using AI to search 400 years of Dutch East India Company archives, surfacing a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinoceroses, and unrecorded volcanic eruptions. The project uses a multi-model pipeline (Jev for fast filtering, Claude Haiku and Claude Code for deeper analysis, and original-document verification) and plans to open-source the workflow as Antiquity.