PurposeClimate-induced damage is a pressing problem for the preservation of cultural properties. Their physical deterioration is often the cumulative effect of different environmental hazards of variable intensity. Among these, fluctuations of temperature and relative humidity may cause nonrecoverable physical changes in building envelopes and artifacts made of hygroscopic materials, such as wood. Microclimatic fluctuations may be caused by several factors, including the presence of many visitors within the historical building. Within this framework, the current work is focused on detecting events taking place in two Norwegian stave churches, by identifying the fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity caused by the presence of people attending the public events.Design/methodology/approachThe identification of such fluctuations and, so, of the presence of people within the churches has been carried out through three different methods. The first is an unsupervised clustering algorithm here termed “density peak,” the second is a supervised deep learning model based on a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) and the third is a novel ad hoc engineering feature approach “unexpected mixing ratio (UMR) peak.”FindingsWhile the first two methods may have some instabilities (in terms of precision, recall and normal mutual information [NMI]), the last one shows a promising performance in the detection of microclimatic fluctuations induced by the presence of visitors.Originality/valueThe novelty of this work stands in using both well-established and in-house ad hoc machine learning algorithms in the field of heritage science, proving that these smart approaches could be of extreme usefulness and could lead to quick data analyses, if used properly.