Foundations

Index:

• Definitions of Information Archaeology
• Why Archaeology?
• Why it’s called “Information Archaeology”
• Cross-Disciplinary Context

Definition of Information Archaeology

Information Archaeology is a discipline that studies digital material—artifacts, versions, metadata, and system-generated traces—as layered evidence of past activity.
It provides methods for reconstructing what happened, how it happened, and the environment that shaped it by analyzing the strata, relationships, and residual traces left behind in digital systems.

It treats digital information the way archaeology treats physical sites:
as layered deposits of activity, shaped by both human behavior and surrounding systems, accumulating over time.

Information Archaeology focuses on:

• stratigraphy (how digital layers form)
• artifacts / ecofacts (system-generated byproducts)
• loss and drift (what disappears or changes)
• context and provenance
• patterns of work, decisions, and environments

Its goal is to restore clarity to complex or fragmented digital histories and enable responsible, evidence-bound interpretation.

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Why Archaeology?

Information Archaeology takes its name from the field of archaeology because digital systems produce material patterns that closely resemble archaeological sites: layers, deposits, residues, disturbances, and boundaries shaped by activity over time.
Where archaeology studies the physical material record of human behaviour, Information Archaeology studies the digital material record created by both human and machine agents.

The discipline does not attempt to replicate archaeology or replace its methods.
Instead, it draws on archaeological logic—particularly stratigraphy, ecofacts vs. artifacts, taphonomy, and context reconstruction—to build a rigorous approach for interpreting digital traces.

Digital material behaves structurally like archaeological material:

• It accumulates in layers
• It contains both intentional artifacts and unintentional ecofacts
• It is shaped by environmental forces (tools, systems, platforms)
• It undergoes disturbance, loss, migration, and drift
• It supports bounded, evidence-first interpretation

Information Archaeology applies these principles to the digital realm, where activity happens faster, loss happens more frequently, and systems themselves leave meaningful material behind.

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Why It’s Called “Information Archaeology”

It’s called archaeology because the analogy is not metaphorical — it’s structural.

Digital information behaves exactly like a site with strata, except the layers are created by:

• file versions
• timestamps
• drafts
• migrations
• sync behavior
• tool transitions
• metadata deposits
• ecofacts (autosaves, caches, thumbnails, residues)

Like archaeology:

1. Digital work accumulates in layers.

Each save, export, rename, and system event produces a new “deposit.”

2. Layers form sequences.

Those sequences reveal what happened first, next, and last.

3. The environment shapes the evidence.

Just as soil, weather, and human behaviour shape physical sites,
cloud sync, file systems, operating systems, and apps shape digital traces.

4. Material is always incomplete.

Loss, overwriting, corruption, drift, and fragmentation are as normal in digital contexts as erosion and disturbance are in physical ones.

5. Interpretation must be constrained by the evidence.

Archaeology doesn’t guess beyond what the layers allow.
Neither does Information Archaeology.

6. Ecofacts matter.

System-generated traces reveal the environment and events even when human-created artifacts are missing or ambiguous.

7. Meaning emerges from layers, context, and relationships.

Not from single objects.

8. You can reconstruct a history from what remains.

That’s the heart of both archaeology and Information Archaeology.

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Cross-Disciplinary Context

Information Archaeology draws from and complements several established fields, including Information Science, Archival Theory, Digital Forensics, Data Management, AI interpretability, Organizational Analysis, and Human–Computer Interaction. While each of these disciplines examines digital material from its own lens, Information Archaeology focuses specifically on how traces accumulate in layers, how systems shape those layers, and how structured evidence can be read as a record of past activity.
It is not a replacement for these fields; it is a methodologically coherent lens that complements and often bridges similar concerns.

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