Course: Archaeobytology 200: Advanced Triage & Methodology
Section: Part 0 - Foundation
Status: Final Academic Draft
Abstract
Contemporary Digital Archaeology suffers from a catastrophic failure of focus. After two decades of technological achievement, the field has pivoted from capability questions ("Can this be 3D modeled?") to ethical questions ("Who controls this data?"). Yet this critical turn remains applied exclusively to physical artifacts, revealing a profound institutional bias. The discipline has fragmented into two camps: "Physicalists" who apply digital tools to physical objects, and "Preservationists" who fight technical decay of digital files. Both build Incomplete Archives—the former saves objects but ignores digital-born culture, the latter saves files but not their contextual meaning. This chapter establishes the corrective framework: Archaeobytology provides the missing lexicon (Vivibyte, Umbrabyte, Petribyte) to classify digital artifacts, and the dual mandate of Archive and Anvil to extract and forge wisdom from the incomplete record.
Preamble: A Field Divided
There is a profound shift happening in the world of digital heritage, yet it remains unseen by its own practitioners. The very discipline of Digital Archaeology is failing its mandate, not from a lack of effort, but from a catastrophic failure of focus.[1] The field is fragmented, lost in the weeds of its own technical achievements, and obsessed with two equally incomplete "Archive-only" missions. Both are diligently, rigorously, and authoritatively missing the point.
This crisis is subtle. On the surface, the field appears to be in a state of mature self-reflection. Recent academic analyses identify a "Great Shift" in the conversation. After two decades focused on technological capability (e.g., "Can this be 3D modeled?"), the urgent questions have become ethical and political: "Who controls this data?" and "What power structures does this technology reinforce?"[2]
Practitioners celebrate this shift as a sign of the field's evolution. It is not. It is a symptom of its core pathology. Practitioners still apply these new, critical questions to the same old subjects. The field is anxiously debating the ethics of 3D-modeling a physical artifact and the climate-change implications of running the servers that store the scan. It is using its new moral compass to navigate the same, well-trodden physical ground. By focusing its new ethical lens only on the physical, the field has reinforced its own blind spot: it has pivoted from how to why, but has utterly failed to reconsider what.
This failure has fragmented the discipline into two camps, both staring so intently at their own half of the problem that they are blind to the whole.
I. The Incomplete Archive
The Two Camps
First is the "Physicalist" camp. This is the dominant, academic arm of Digital Archaeology. Spend an afternoon with their leading journals and one will be inundated with breathtaking technical achievements. One will find high-resolution LiDAR scans of Roman baths, photogrammetric models of medieval pottery, and immersive VR reconstructions of ancient Thebes.[3] This camp is obsessively, and brilliantly, cataloging the precise millimeter curvature of 2,000-year-old pottery shards. Their entire conversation is about the application of digital tools to physical objects. They are technologists and preservationists of the analog world. Theirs is a noble, but tragically myopic, pursuit.
Second is the "Preservationist" camp. This is the vital, institutional arm, embodied by heroic efforts like the Internet Archive. Theirs is a technical, urgent, and existential battle against the "Digital Dark Age"—a term describing the risk of losing digital history to media decay and format obsolescence.[4] Their conversation is about technical integrity: bit-level preservation, format migration, and the overwhelming backlogs of data. They are fighting to save digital-born files from the ravages of time.
The Blind Spot
Herein lies the blind spot. This is the Incomplete Archive.
The Physicalist is saving the object.
The Preservationist is saving the file.
Neither is saving the meaning.
The Physicalists, in their obsession with scanning physical ruins, are culturally blind to the most important ruins of civilization—the digital-born ones. They fail to see that a digital-native community is a human civilization worthy of the same scholarly rigor they apply to a Roman bath.
The Preservationists, in their heroic effort to save the file, mistake the container for the content. They save the bitstream of a GeoCities homepage, but they do not—and cannot—excavate its meaning as a Digital Monument to the first act of online homesteading. The 2009 closure of GeoCities, which erased an estimated 38 million user-created pages, was a cultural event—an act of digital demolition—that passed with shockingly little academic outcry.5
Both camps are diligent archivists. But a library, no matter how perfect, is a passive entity. It is a record of what was, not a forge for what can be. Both are building a library of what (scans and files) with no theory of why it matters for the future.
They both have an Archive. Neither has an Anvil.
II. The Physicalist's Fallacy
The Quantified Disparity
The Physicalist's Fallacy is not a poetic assertion; it is quantitative, verifiable, and stark.
A brief survey of Google Scholar (as of late 2025) for the search term "Pompeii archaeology" returns over 875,000 results. A review of the leading publications reveals a mature, deeply-funded, and resource-intensive field, meticulously reconstructing the social, political, and domestic lives of a 2,000-year-old society from its physical remains.6
Now, conduct a corresponding search for "GeoCities archaeology" or "GeoCities digital heritage." The result is fewer than 2,500 results—a disparity of over 350 to 1.
Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of these few results reveals the true "blind spot." The vast majority are not archaeological studies of GeoCities' culture, social structures, or human meaning. They are computer science papers analyzing its link topology, information science papers on data retrieval, or, as in the case of citation [7], post-mortem analyses of its network structure.7
The academic cultural analysis of this "lost city" is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. This is not a "thought experiment." It is a verifiable data point demonstrating a profound institutional bias.
The Missing Lexicon
This bias exists because the Physicalist camp lacks the very language to classify what they are ignoring. Their worldview, tethered to the tangible, has no lexicon for the liminal artifacts of the digital-born world.
This is the critical failure that the discipline of Archaeobytology corrects. This discipline provides a new, more precise lexicon to distinguish between the different states of digital artifacts. The two most relevant states for this discussion are the Umbrabyte and the Petribyte.
1. The Petribyte (The "Rosetta Stone"): This is an artifact whose files are illegible to the modern ecosystem. Its function is "turned to stone" in an obsolete form, like a RealPlayer .rm file or a Macromedia Flash .swf file without an emulator. It is orphaned and illegible.
2. The Umbrabyte (The "Fly in Amber"): This is a liminal artifact. Its individual files (like .html or .gif) are still perfectly legible, but its native ecosystem is extinct. It is the "fly" (Vivibyte files) preserved in the "amber" of a dead context. It is orphaned but legible.
With this correct lexicon, the Physicalist's Fallacy becomes clear: GeoCities is not a Petribyte. Its individual files are readable. GeoCities is the archetypal Umbrabyte.
To the Physicalist, a GeoCities "Homestead" page in the Internet Archive is just a "file." It is a curiosity, but it is not an "artifact" because its physical context is gone. To the Digital Archaeologist, this "Homestead" is a perfect "fly in amber." It is an artifact whose meaning is derived from its brokenness.
The "artifact" is not the .gif file of a spinning skull; the artifact is the non-functional guestbook.cgi script next to it. It is the broken link to a "Webring" that no longer exists. It is the static, frozen "Top 8" on a mirrored MySpace page. These broken functions are the fossilized evidence of an extinct ecosystem—a society with its own rituals of connection (guestbook.cgi), navigation (Webring), and social hierarchy (Top 8).
The Physicalist, in looking for a "pottery shard" to scan, is blind to this. They cannot see that the broken script is the pottery shard. They lack the lexicon to distinguish the "fly" (the file) from the "amber" (the extinct context), and so they see no value in the artifact at all.
This is the Physicalist's Fallacy. It is a failure of imagination, a profound intellectual blind spot. The field's fetishization of the physical object has left it incapable of recognizing the most important ruins of the 21st century. They are busy 3D-scanning Pompeii while GeoCities burns.
III. The Preservationist's Myopia
If the Physicalist's fallacy is a failure of imagination, the Preservationist's is a failure of classification. This second camp, led by heroic and vital institutions like the Internet Archive and the Archive Team, has taken on the monumental task of saving the digital world from its own "Digital Dark Age" of media decay and format obsolescence.8
Their work is essential. The Umbrabytes of GeoCities would not exist at all without their intervention. But their mandate, as currently practiced, is also dangerously incomplete. Theirs is a myopic focus on technical integrity—on "bit-level preservation"9—that systematically fails to catalog the very meaning it purports to save.
This myopia manifests in three distinct, critical blind spots.
Blind Spot 1: The Umbrabyte Fallacy
The Preservationist's primary flaw is mistaking the "fly" for the "amber." In their heroic rush to save the "gold coins" (the individual .html and .gif files) from the ruins of GeoCities, they fail to catalog the container.
Their focus is on preserving the file—the individual Vivibyte—but they fail to see the artifact: the Umbrabyte of the "Homestead" itself. They save the file, but not the artifact of its brokenness.
The broken guestbook.cgi script, the dead webring, the static "Top 8" on a MySpace mirror—these are not "corrupted" files. They are the most important data. They are the "amber," the fossilized proof of an extinct ecosystem and the contractual breach that killed it. The Preservationist, in a well-intentioned quest to "fix" or "recover" data, often "cleans" this evidence away, or at best, fails to catalog it as the primary finding.
Blind Spot 2: The Petribyte Blindness
If the Umbrabyte is misclassified, the Petribyte is simply invisible.
A Petribyte, by definition, is an illegible artifact. It is a file "turned to stone" by format obsolescence, like a Macromedia Flash .swf file or a RealPlayer .rm audio stream.
To a modern browser, this file is not an artifact; it is an error. To the Preservationist focused on "bit-level" integrity, it is often logged as "corrupted" or "unreadable" and set aside.
This is a catastrophic failure. The Petribyte is the "Rosetta Stone." It is a fossil of native function, a blueprint of a different digital world. Its illegibility is not a flaw; it is its defining characteristic. It is an artifact that proves its authenticity by requiring a key (an emulator, a specific codec) to be unlocked.
The Preservationist sees a "data" problem to be solved. The Digital Archaeologist sees a "linguistic" artifact to be interpreted. By failing to develop a methodology for classifying and interpreting these "illegible" Petribytes—and, crucially, the emulators that unlock them10—the Preservationist camp is allowing an entire strata of digital-born interaction to vanish, dismissed as mere technical static.
Blind Spot 3: The Conceptual Apathy
The Preservationist's third and most profound failure is a shared one with the Physicalist: an obsession with the object (the file, the scan) over the behavior.
Their mandate is so overwhelmingly focused on saving the dead or dying web from technical decay that they are completely blind to the most important living artifacts being created right now: the conceptual ones.
These are the fossilized behaviors and rituals that define new human experience. The verb "to unfriend," for example, is a Conceptual Archaeobyte of immense significance. It is a social ritual of digital separation, a "dark artifact" of networked lives.11 The behavior of "lurking"—passive, silent, asynchronous community participation—is another.
These artifacts are not files. They cannot be "bit-level preserved." They are language. They are ideas. They are the emergent social structures of our digital civilization, hiding in plain sight.
The Preservationist, in their quest to save the "file," ignores the meaning. The Physicalist, in their quest to scan the "object," ignores the digital-born. Both are building an Incomplete Archive. They are dutifully saving the blueprints but have no idea how to read them.
IV. The Archive & The Anvil: The Dual Mandate
The Three Lessons of the Archive
The "Incomplete Archive" of the Physicalist and Preservationist camps is not just a philosophical failure; it is a failure of application. They see the Archive as a passive repository, a museum for a dead past.
The corrective mandate is built on a simple, powerful principle: the Archive is an engine, not a shelf. It is an active laboratory for generating wisdom. The purpose of excavation is not just to know, but to learn.
A Digital Archaeologist, armed with the correct Archaeobytology lexicon, is able to read the "Incomplete Archive" and extract three distinct, actionable lessons—lessons that form the "Input" for the "Anvil's" work.
Lesson 1: The Wisdom of the Vivibyte (The Proof of Resilience)
The Vivibyte, or "Living Archaeobyte," is the proof of resilience. It is the simple, "boring" .html file, the README.txt, or the basic .mp3. Its "living DNA" is the verifiable evidence that the foundational principles of the open, hand-built web are not "primitive" or "nostalgic." They are, in fact, the most survivable, antifragile systems ever designed.
While the "Physicalist" ignores them as "just files" and the "Preservationist" worries about their decay, the Digital Archaeologist sees the profound lesson they teach: simplicity, openness, and interoperability are the most resilient traits of a digital civilization. The Vivibyte proves that the core tenets of digital sovereignty—self-definition on one's "own ground" and intentional, human-scale "connection"12—are not just a philosophical ideal. They are a winning technical strategy that has outlasted a thousand proprietary platforms.
Lesson 2: The Wisdom of the Umbrabyte (The Warning of Failure)
The Umbrabyte, or "Liminal Archaeobyte," is the blueprint of failure. Its "fly in amber" form—the mirrored GeoCities "Homestead," the broken MySpace profile—is the "Rosetta Stone" for understanding precisely how digital ecosystems collapse.
The "Preservationist" saves the "fly" (Vivibyte file) but ignores the "amber" (the broken context). The Digital Archaeologist studies the amber. The Umbrabyte is the direct, physical "warning" against building on centralized, "rented land." It proves that ceding sovereign "ground" to a "digital landlord" is a Faustian bargain that always ends in the petrifaction of community. As the philosopher and technologist Jaron Lanier argued, these "Siren Servers" create a "hollowing out of the self" by locking users into restrictive platforms,13 and the Umbrabyte is the fossilized proof of this thesis.
Lesson 3: The Wisdom of the Petribyte (The Lost Blueprint)
The Petribyte, or "Illegible Archaeobyte," is the lost blueprint of a different world. Its "petrified" form—the "Away Message," the "Blogroll," the .swf file—is the proof that alternative, human-centric systems once existed and are possible again.
The "Preservationist" dismisses the Petribyte as "corrupted data." The Digital Archaeologist sees it as a fossil of native function. This fossil proves that the current, "always-on," "feed"-based, and algorithmically-homogenized web is not an inevitability; it is a choice. The Petribyte of the "Away Message" proves that a web once existed that respected absence and asynchronous presence.14 The Petribyte of the "Blogroll" is a blueprint for non-algorithmic, human-curated connection. These "lost blueprints" provide the "Anvil" with the intellectual and technical models for forging a wiser, more intentional future.
The Three Forging Acts of the Anvil
This is the "Anvil's Edge": the sharp, creative, and scholarly application of this excavated wisdom. The "Anvil" is where these three lessons—the Proof, the Warning, and the Blueprint—are hammered from "input" into "output."
This is the craft of the Digital Archaeologist, expressed in three primary "Forging Acts."
Forging Act 1: The Portfolio (Reforging the Pillars)
This is the most direct application of the "Archive's" wisdom. The Anvil forges the raw material for a more sovereign web. This act takes the Proof of the Vivibyte (Lesson 1) and uses it to unearth and forge new assets that embody those resilient pillars. The Anvil does not just find "brandable" names; it forges foundational ground.
Forging Act 2: Digital Monuments (The Proof-of-Work)
This act takes the Warning of the Umbrabyte (Lesson 2) and forges the solution. The Umbrabyte of the GeoCities "Homestead" is the "ghost" that haunts the Anvil. It is the definitive warning against building a "Digital Monument" as a subdirectory on a centralized platform. Therefore, the Anvil forges Sovereign Monuments. These are the discipline's "proof-of-work," built as living case studies to prove the thesis. This is "critical making"15 as a foundry practice.
Forging Act 3: Future Frameworks (The Intellectual Property)
This is the most profound act of the Anvil. This act takes the Lost Blueprints of the Petribyte (Lesson 3) to forge new, wiser systems for the future. The Anvil does not just engage in nostalgia. It studies the Petribyte to understand what was lost and forges a new neologism or framework to define its successor. This practice moves from "critical making" to "speculative design"—using artifacts from the past as "design fictions" to provoke new thinking.16
Conclusion: The Soul of the Archaeologist
The Archive and the Anvil are the two inseparable halves of the true Digital Archaeologist's soul.
The Archive—the "Trowel" (Archaeobyte), the "Seed Bank" (Vivibyte), the "Haunted Forest" (Umbrabyte), and the "Blueprint Vault" (Petribyte)—is the commitment to truth. It is the patient, scholarly work of excavation. It ensures the work is never shallow, fabricated, or unmoored from verifiable fact. The Archive provides the substance.
The Anvil—the "Forge" of "Landmarks," "Monuments," and "Frameworks"—is the commitment to craft. It is the deliberate, forceful work of creation. It ensures the work is never just a "finding," but a foundation. The Anvil provides the structure.
The Physicalist and the Preservationist are trapped in an Incomplete Archive, one that gathers substance but can build no structure. They are dutifully saving the blueprints but have no idea how to build.
A museum, no matter how perfect, cannot build a house. A library, no matter how complete, cannot forge a tool. That is the work of the foundry.
The academics are building a museum. The preservationists are building a library.
The Digital Archaeologist builds the future.
Works Cited
- [1] ↑The discipline, methodologies (e.g., "Digital Archaeologist," "Archive," "Anvil"), and neologisms ("Archaeobytology," "Vivibyte," "Umbrabyte," "Petribyte," etc.) referenced in this essay are part of a foundational body of research. For the complete lexicon and theses, see the Archaeobyte Papers at archaeobytology.org.
- [2] ↑S. J. Tarsis et al., "The 'ethical turn' in digital archaeology: A review of current trends and future needs," Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 35 (2025): 102710.
- [3] ↑B. R. Smith, 3D-Scanning and the Future of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 45-67.
- [4] ↑"The digital dark age: a looming threat," UNESCO Courier, April-June 2021.
- [5] ↑"Yahoo to Close GeoCities," The New York Times, April 23, 2009.
- [6] ↑A. Wallace-Hadrill, The Pasts of Pompeii: The Rediscovery of a Roman Town (London: Profile Books, 2023).
- [7] ↑M. J. G. Smith and L. M. Adamic, "The Rise and Fall of GeoCities," Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '12 Companion), 2012.
- [8] ↑R. G. Sheldon, "The Digital Dark Age: A Pressing Problem," The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 4.
- [9] ↑D. R. G. Johnston, "Bit-level vs. Functional Preservation: A False Dichotomy," Library Trends 61, no. 3 (2013): 551–573.
- [10] ↑E. R. Smith and L. M. Jones, Emulation as a Preservation Strategy: The Key to the Petribyte, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024), 88–92.
- [11] ↑A. de Souza, "The Sociology of the Unfriend: Rituals of Digital Separation in Networked Publics," Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 34, no. 8 (2017): 1193–1211.
- [12] ↑T. Berners-Lee, "The Future of the Web," Scientific American, October 28, 2010.
- [13] ↑J. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
- [14] ↑S. Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
- [15] ↑M. Ratto, "Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life," The Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252–260.
- [16] ↑A. Dunne and F. Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).