IN THE INDIANA JONES MOVIES, archaeology works like this: unearth artifact, uncover the past’s secrets, save the day, hide artifact again in giant warehouse. It’s not far from reality. In practice, relics are exhumed, then often hidden again, carefully piled up in storerooms, while theories about them are buried in one of hundreds of archaeology journals. New discoveries don’t necessarily shine a bright light on the past.

Throughout the Levant, an archaeologically rich area that hugs the eastern Mediterranean from modern Turkey to Egypt, pottery emerges from the ground by the ton. With so much material, says Andrea M. Berlin, a professor of archaeology and an expert on the region’s ceramics, connections could get missed: possible insights into long-distance trade patterns unnoticed; data that could link changes in economies and systems of government lost in footnotes. Berlin is leading an effort to digitize history that she hopes will allow archaeologists to more easily share newfound knowledge and make those connections.

The Levantine Ceramics Project includes a public, open-source web application for researchers to register and search archaeological finds. Archaeologists visiting the website, which launched as a BETA version in 2012 and is now live, can explore a repository of ceramic pottery dating from the Neolithic era (roughly 5500 BCE) through the Ottoman period (dissolved in the 1920s). Each artifact is registered with details such as a picture, location, description, and date; researchers can filter searches by period and region. The website, which received seed funding from BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing, is already packed with details of finds as diverse as 2,000-year-old cooking pots from Galilee and Iron Age vessels from coastal plains.