The Field Without a Floor

On the Ontological Vacancy of Digital Archaeology

Digital Archaeology Reconsidered: Essay I of IV

Unearth Heritage Foundry

Abstract

Digital archaeology has emerged as a field of practice without a coherent theory of what digital artifacts are. The essay traces the genealogy of "digital archaeology" as a term, revealing its fragmented deployment across at least four incommensurable domains: computational methods applied to traditional archaeology, the forensic recovery of obsolete digital media, the nostalgic recovery of early internet culture, and the media-archaeological study of technological imaginaries. Definitional promiscuity signals a foundational vacancy at the heart of the field rather than mere inconvenience of nomenclature; the confusion signals a foundational vacancy. Practitioners have been doing digital archaeology without articulating what they are doing it upon. The essay argues that filling this ontological vacancy remains necessary before digital archaeology can mature as a rigorous discipline. Archaeobytology, the study of digital artifacts as a distinct ontological class, provides the necessary theoretical foundation the field has lacked.

Introduction: The Name Without the Ground

Consider the peculiar fate of a term that names everything and therefore nothing. "Digital archaeology" has been invoked to describe the photogrammetric reconstruction of Roman baths, the recovery of climate data from degraded magnetic tape, the nostalgic excavation of GeoCities homepages, and the theoretical examination of media imaginaries across centuries.¹ Divergent applications do not merely represent different facets of a shared methodology. Distinct inquiries address fundamentally different objects while governed by fundamentally different epistemologies.

The practitioner who uses LiDAR to map Mayan ruins and the practitioner who recovers a 1997 RealPlayer file from a corroded floppy disk may both call themselves "digital archaeologists," but the two share little beyond the adjective. The former applies digital tools to physical artifacts; the latter applies forensic methods to digital artifacts. The former's object of study existed before the digital; the latter's object of study exists only because of the digital. Conflating such disparate practices under a single disciplinary umbrella represents conceptual incoherence rather than interdisciplinary generosity.

The essay performs a necessary act of ground-clearing. Clear definition must precede rigorous practice. Precise definition requires confronting the uncomfortable question the field has largely avoided: What are digital artifacts, and what makes them different from everything else?

The answer requires a theoretical framework the field does not yet possess. The discipline requires archaeobytology.

Part I: A Genealogy of Fragmentation

The Computational Turn: Digital Tools for Physical Archaeology

The earliest and still most institutionally dominant use of "digital archaeology" refers to the application of computational methods to traditional archaeological inquiry. Here, the archaeology remains archaeology in the classical sense, the study of physical artifacts and sites alongside material culture, while "digital" functions as an instrumental modifier describing the tools employed rather than the objects studied.

The computational turn has deep roots. As Ethan Watrall has documented, the history of computational archaeology extends to the pioneering work of James Deetz in the 1960s, who employed computers at MIT to perform stylistic analyses of Arikara ceramics.² The early volumes of Computer Applications in Archaeology, launched in 1973, reveal a discipline preoccupied with databases and statistical analysis alongside the infrastructural challenges of making archaeological datasets computationally tractable.³

The contemporary expression of this tradition encompasses an impressive technical arsenal: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for spatial analysis, photogrammetry and structure-from-motion for three-dimensional reconstruction, remote sensing technologies including satellite imagery and aerial photography, agent-based modeling for simulating past social dynamics, and machine learning applications for pattern recognition in large datasets.⁴ The digital techniques have enabled transformative work. The reconstruction of deteriorating wall paintings in the Sarno Baths at Pompeii, the documentation of endangered heritage sites at Delphi through the Digital Enterprise for Learning Practice of Heritage Initiative, and countless other projects demonstrate the power of digital methods to preserve, analyze, and visualize the physical past.⁵

Yet the tradition, however valuable, considers archaeology with the digital rather than archaeology of the digital. The current practice represents archaeology with the digital. The objects of study remain potsherds and stratigraphy, monuments and burial sites, the same material culture that archaeology has studied since its emergence from antiquarianism in the nineteenth century. The digital functions as the instrument, not the artifact. Labeling such work "digital archaeology" without qualification privileges the method over the object in a way that would seem anomalous in any other context. Scholars do not call the use of carbon-14 dating "radioactive archaeology" or the use of trowels "metallurgical archaeology."

The Forensic Turn: Rescuing Damaged and Obsolete Digital Materials

A second and fundamentally different deployment of "digital archaeology" emerged in the late 1990s, focused not on applying digital tools to physical artifacts but on recovering digital artifacts themselves from obsolescence, damage, and decay.

The landmark articulation of this approach appeared in Seamus Ross and Ann Gow's 1999 report for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC); Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources.⁶ Ross and Gow defined digital archaeology as "methods and procedures to rescue content from damaged media or from obsolete or damaged hardware and software environments." The definition framed archaeology in a metaphorical but meaningful sense: the excavation of buried data from the sedimentary layers of technological change.

The forensic tradition addresses distinctly archaeological problems. How are bitstreams recovered from degraded floppy disks when the magnetic signal has weakened below threshold? How are files interpreted when written in obsolete formats and no documentation survives? How is the experience of using software reconstructed when the hardware it ran on has become museum pieces? Yale University's Di Bonaventura Family Digital Archaeology and Preservation Lab, the National Library of the Netherlands' Web Archaeology project, and numerous other institutional initiatives have developed sophisticated answers to these questions.⁷

The forensic turn recognizes something the computational tradition does not: that digital artifacts constitute a distinct category of objects with their own material properties and decay mechanisms alongside preservation challenges. A degraded magnetic tape serves not as a vessel for information that exists independently of its substrate; the information is the magnetic orientation of particles on the tape, and when those orientations shift beyond recovery, the information is irretrievable. A file format is not a convention for organizing data; the format constitutes the ontological condition of the data's intelligibility, and when that format becomes obsolete, the data becomes a cipher.

Yet the forensic tradition, for all its practical sophistication, has remained atheoretical. The field has developed advanced techniques for recovering digital artifacts without developing a systematic account of what those artifacts are. The forensic digital archaeologist knows how to image a failing hard drive, how to emulate an obsolete operating system, and how to reverse-engineer an undocumented file format. However, demanding an articulation of the ontological status of a "file" causes them to reach for metaphors borrowed from physical objects (documents and containers as well as locations) that obscure more than they illuminate.

The Nostalgic Turn: Excavating Early Internet Culture

Nostalgic practice characterizes the digital archaeology of the Wayback Machine spelunker, the GeoCities archivist, the retro-computing enthusiast. The behavior is driven less by professional mandate than by what Alan Liu has identified as the "ethos of the unknown" that haunts knowledge work in the digital age.⁸

The nostalgic turn treats early internet culture as a lost civilization. The homepages of the 1990s, the webrings and guestbooks and "under construction" GIFs, exemplify the distinctive aesthetics of Web 1.0. Archaeological evidence of a digital world that has vanished almost as completely as the Bronze Age emerges from these artifacts. The practitioner excavates not to preserve data per se but to recover meanings. Goals include understanding what it felt like to build a homepage on GeoCities, what social functions the Away Message served before the always-on smartphone, and what it meant to "surf" a web that was still wild.

Academic and amateur efforts have produced valuable work. Jason Scott's Archive Team has rescued terabytes of endangered web content. The One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project has preserved and analyzed hundreds of thousands of GeoCities pages. Academic researchers like Lori Emerson and Nick Montfort have excavated early digital platforms as sites of cultural meaning.⁹ The nostalgic turn recognizes that digital artifacts are not technical objects but cultural ones. A personal homepage constitutes a "text" as much as a poem or a diary entry, and deserves the same interpretive attention.

Yet the nostalgic turn struggles with the tension between recovery and romanticization. A persistent danger exists that digital archaeology becomes digital antiquarianism, a wistful accumulation of curiosities without theoretical framework or critical edge. The claim that "the old web was better" may be true in certain respects, but as a scholarly posture the statement substitutes sentiment for analysis. More fundamentally, the nostalgic turn shared with the forensic turn a lack of ontological clarity. What kind of object is a GeoCities homepage? What is preserved when mirrored to a new server, and what is lost? Lacking answers to these questions, the nostalgic digital archaeologist is left with a collection without a catalog, artifacts without a typology.

The Media-Archaeological Turn: Apparatus, Imaginary, Deep Time

A fourth tradition complicates matters further by appropriating "archaeology" in a specifically Foucauldian sense. Media archaeology, as elaborated by Jussi Parikka, Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst, and others, is not primarily concerned with recovering lost objects but with excavating the "conditions of existence" of media forms. The factors include the technological imaginaries and discursive formations as well as the material infrastructures that make certain media possible while foreclosing others.¹⁰

Parikka defines media archaeology as existing "somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s."¹¹ Zielinski advocates for "variantology," a poetic excavation of the "deep time" of media that refuses teleological narratives of technological progress.¹² Huhtamo studies recurring "topoi" in media culture, such as the phantasmagoria and the peep show alongside the immersive spectacle, that resurface across centuries in different technological guises.¹³

Media archaeology offers theoretical sophistication the other deployments lack. The discipline takes seriously the question of what media are, not what they do. Scholarship recognizes that technologies are not neutral tools but "conditions of existence" that shape what can be thought, said, and experienced. The field refuses the presentism that treats current technological arrangements as natural or inevitable.

Yet media archaeology, despite its theoretical power, is not primarily concerned with digital artifacts in the sense that concerns this inquiry. Analysis focuses on apparatus and imaginary rather than object and instance. The media archaeologist studies "the computer" as a cultural-historical formation; the digital archaeologist (in the forensic or nostalgic sense) studies this file on that disk created then by these people. The two levels of analysis are different, and collapsing them under a single term only compounds the confusion.

Part II: The Vacancy at the Heart

The Ontological Question Unasked

What unites these four traditions, despite their differences, is a shared failure to ask the foundational question: What are digital artifacts?

Theoretical inquiry concerns not file formats or storage media or encoding schemes, though it encompasses all of these. Inquiry concerns the mode of being of entities that exist only as patterns of electromagnetic states, that can be copied without loss, that require interpretation by machines to become accessible to humans, and that decay through mechanisms entirely unlike those governing physical objects. The issue represents, in the philosophical sense, an ontological question, a question about the fundamental nature of a class of beings.

The philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker has argued that artifacts in general are "ontologically on a par with other material objects," constituted by but not identical to their physical substrates.¹⁴ Yet digital artifacts problematize the analysis in ways physical artifacts do not. A ceramic pot is constituted by clay particles arranged in a particular configuration; destroying those particles or their configuration causes the pot to cease to exist. A digital file is constituted by... what, precisely? Magnetic orientations on a platter? Voltage states in a memory chip? The "same" file can exist simultaneously on multiple substrates, can be transmitted across networks as patterns of electromagnetic radiation, and can be copied indefinitely without any degradation of the "original." In what sense is it even meaningful to speak of a digital "original"?

Jannis Kallinikos, Aleksi Aaltonen, and Attila Marton have argued that digital artifacts possess an "ambivalent ontology" characterized by fundamental attributes of editability, interactivity, openness, and distributedness.¹⁵ Digital objects are "embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable." The consequent "state of flux and constant transfiguration" renders their identity unstable in ways that physical artifacts are not.

Yet Kallinikos and colleagues, writing primarily for information systems researchers, do not pursue the archaeological implications of their analysis. If digital artifacts are ontologically ambivalent, what does excavation entail? If they are constantly transfiguring, what does preservation mean? If their identity is unstable, what does cataloging require?

Ontological inquiries constitute the foundational questions any archaeology must answer before it can begin its work. Physical archaeology rests on centuries of theoretical development regarding what artifacts are and how they decay; what preservation means and how typologies can be constructed. Digital archaeology has been practicing for decades without comparable theoretical grounding.

The Metaphor Problem

The absence of ontological clarity forces practitioners into reliance on borrowed metaphors, and the metaphors mislead.

Scholars speak of digital "documents," but a document implies a fixed text on a physical substrate, and digital texts are neither fixed nor physically inscribed in any straightforward sense. Practitioners speak of digital "archives," but an archive implies a stable collection of stable objects, and digital collections are neither. Users speak of "files" and "folders," borrowing the spatial metaphors of the physical office, but files are not discrete objects occupying discrete locations. Data fragments are scattered across disk sectors, reconstituted on the fly by filesystem drivers, potentially fragmentary or corrupted in ways invisible to the user.

Even the archaeological metaphors scholars reach for (excavation, stratigraphy, artifact, site) carry assumptions that may not transfer. Physical stratigraphy assumes that lower layers are older; digital "layers" (overwritten data and version histories alongside backup snapshots) follow no such simple rule. Physical excavation is destructive; digital "excavation" can be non-destructive, producing exact copies without disturbing originals. Physical artifacts are unique instances; digital artifacts can exist in unlimited identical copies.

The metaphor problem is not rhetorical. Metaphors shape practice. Conceiving digital preservation on the model of museum conservation, keeping the object in controlled conditions to prevent physical decay, leads to preservation systems that miss the distinctively digital threats; format obsolescence and platform dependency as well as bit rot without physical substrate damage. Conceiving digital excavation on the model of archaeological digs, careful exposure of objects in situ, misses the distinctively digital possibilities; perfect duplication and remote access alongside computational analysis at scale.

The Institutional Fragmentation

The conceptual fragmentation of digital archaeology manifests institutionally. No professional society of digital archaeologists exists. No journal of digital archaeology (as distinct from journals of computational archaeology, digital preservation, media studies, and so forth) serves the field. Agreed-upon credentials, methodologies, or standards remain absent.

Institutional fragmentation does not arise because the field is young. Computational archaeology dates to the 1960s; forensic digital archaeology to the 1990s; media archaeology to the 1980s. Decades of practice have produced sophisticated techniques but no disciplinary consolidation. Practitioners trained in different traditions often do not read each other's literature, attend each other's conferences, or recognize each other's work as belonging to the same field.

The fragmentation is not accidental. Chaos follows from the ontological vacancy. A discipline requires a shared understanding of its object of study. Geologists study rocks; biologists study living organisms; physicists study matter and energy. What do digital archaeologists study? Without a clear answer, the field cannot cohere.

Part III: Toward a Floor

The Archaeobytological Proposition

The argument of this essay has been diagnostic; digital archaeology lacks a coherent theory of what digital artifacts are, and this lack prevents the field from consolidating as a rigorous discipline. The argument of the subsequent essays in this series will be constructive; archaeobytology provides the missing theoretical foundation.

The term "archaeobytology" combines archaeo- (ancient, original, primitive) with -byte (the fundamental unit of digital information) and -ology (the study of). The name designates the systematic study of digital artifacts as a distinct ontological class, entities that share certain fundamental properties by virtue of their digital nature, regardless of their content, format, or cultural function.¹⁶

The archaeobytological proposition maintains that digital artifacts cannot be adequately theorized through frameworks developed for physical objects or analog media. Digital artifacts constitute a novel kind of entity, and understanding them requires a novel theoretical apparatus. Theoretical frameworks must account for:

• The substrate-independence of digital information: A file can exist on magnetic disk or solid-state memory, on optical media or as patterns of electromagnetic radiation in transit, remaining "the same" file throughout. What kind of identity is this?
• The perfect replicability of digital artifacts: Unlike physical artifacts, which can only be copied imperfectly, digital artifacts can be duplicated with bit-for-bit exactitude unlimited times. What does "original" mean in this context?
• The machine-dependence of digital intelligibility: A digital artifact is unintelligible without appropriate hardware and software to interpret it. A physical artifact can be examined directly, while a digital artifact can only be examined through mediation. What are the epistemological implications?
• The distinctive decay mechanisms of digital materiality: Digital artifacts do not decay like physical objects. They suffer bit rot, format obsolescence, platform dependency, link rot. What preservation strategies are appropriate?
• The relational constitution of digital objects: Digital artifacts exist within ecosystems of dependencies: operating systems, file formats, network protocols, rendering engines. A webpage is not a self-contained object but a set of instructions that produce different results depending on what interprets them. How do we bound the object of study?

Archaeobytology proposes a taxonomic framework for classifying digital artifacts according to their state, the degree to which they remain functional within their native context. The taxonomy distinguishes:

• Vivibytes: Living digital artifacts remain fully functional and accessible within contemporary systems. Examples include an MP3 file playable on current devices or an HTML page that renders correctly in modern browsers.
• Umbrabytes: Liminal digital artifacts exist trapped between life and death. The items are preserved in form but compromised in function. A GeoCities homepage archived on the Wayback Machine, whose HTML renders but whose guestbook scripts cannot execute and whose webring links are broken, typifies this category.
• Petribytes: Petrified digital artifacts have lost their native function entirely. Examples include a RealPlayer .rm file without a functioning player or a Flash .swf game on a browser that no longer supports the plugin.
• Nullibytes: Artifacts lost entirely may be theoretically recoverable through forensic techniques or known to have existed through secondary documentation, but they no longer exist in any accessible form.

The taxonomy is not descriptive. The model functions prescriptively: different states require different interventions. Vivibytes require proactive preservation to prevent transition to Umbrabyte or Petribyte states. Umbrabytes require emulation and migration or contextual documentation to restore or record their lost functionality. Petribytes require either forensic recovery through emulation or ethnographic documentation of what their functioning once meant.

The Archive and the Anvil

Archaeobytology as a discipline operates through what has been termed "the Archive and the Anvil": a dual commitment to scholarly excavation and generative creation.¹⁷

The Archive represents the commitment to truth. The patient, rigorous work of excavating and classifying as well as preserving digital artifacts involves building the Lexicon that names the phenomena, the Typology that classifies them, and the Protocols that govern their excavation and preservation. The Archive provides the substance of the discipline: its evidentiary base and documented findings alongside its accumulated knowledge.

The Anvil represents the commitment to craft. The deliberate work of forging new artifacts, frameworks, and systems informed by archaeological knowledge builds Digital Landmarks (sovereign reference points resistant to platform decay) and Digital Monuments (preservation projects for endangered artifacts) alongside Future Frameworks (new technical and conceptual systems designed to avoid the failures documented by the Archive). The Anvil provides the structure of the discipline: its interventions and applications as well as its contribution to the ongoing construction of the digital world.

A digital archaeology that is only Archive becomes antiquarianism, a wistful accumulation of curiosities without purpose or direction. A digital archaeology that is only Anvil becomes presentism, building without learning, repeating the mistakes the Archive would have warned against. Only through both together can the discipline achieve its full purpose. Understanding the digital past enables building a wiser digital future.

Conclusion: The Work Ahead

The essay has cleared ground. Construction, however, has not yet begun.

The argument has been that digital archaeology, as currently practiced, suffers from a foundational vacancy, a lack of coherent theory regarding the nature of its objects of study. Vacancy manifests in definitional fragmentation and metaphorical confusion alongside institutional incoherence. The field has been practicing without knowing what it practices upon.

The essays that follow will be constructive. Essay II, "The Archaeobyte Thesis," will articulate the positive theory. What digital artifacts are, why they constitute a distinct ontological class, and how they should be taxonomized will be addressed. Essay III, "Decay, Persistence, and the Liminal Archive," will develop the methodological implications. What it means to do archaeology archaeobytologically, what questions become askable, and what methods become necessary will be explored. Essay IV, "The Politics of Digital Stratigraphy," will address the critical dimensions. How digital archaeology is necessarily political, how platform capitalism shapes the conditions of archaeological inquiry, and how the discipline must position itself against forces that seek to enforce digital forgetting will be examined.

Together, these essays will argue for a proposition that may seem ambitious but remains accurate; Digital archaeology, properly understood, is archaeobytology. The former names the field; the latter names its theoretical foundation and methodology. One cannot practice digital archaeology without an implicit or explicit archaeobytological framework. The present inquiry argues for making that framework explicit, rigorous, and systematic.

The field without a floor has practiced long enough. Foundation building must begin.

Notes

Works Cited

Baker, Lynne Rudder. "The Ontology of Artifacts." Philosophical Explorations 7, no. 2 (2004): 99–111.

Graham, Shawn. "Topic Modeling as Distant Reading." In The Open Digital Archaeology Textbook, 2020. https://o-date.github.io/draft/book/.

Huhtamo, Erkki. "Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study." In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 27–47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Kallinikos, Jannis, Aleksi Aaltonen, and Attila Marton. "The Ambivalent Ontology of Digital Artifacts." MIS Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2013): 357–370.

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Niccolucci, Franco. "Digital Archaeology." In Contemporary Digital Humanities, 2020. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/nudh1/chapter/digital-archaeology/.

Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Ross, Seamus, and Ann Gow. Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources. JISC/NPO Study within the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme on the Preservation of Electronic Materials. London: Library Information Technology Centre, 1999.

Unearth Heritage Foundry. The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology. 2025. https://unearth.wiki.

Watrall, Ethan. "Building Scholars and Communities of Practice in Digital Heritage and Archaeology." Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, no. 2 (2019): 140–151.

Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Digital Archaeology Reconsidered is a four-part essay series by Unearth Heritage Foundry examining the theoretical foundations of digital archaeology. Essay II, "The Archaeobyte Thesis," will appear next in this series.

Citation: Unearth Heritage Foundry, "The Field Without a Floor: On the Ontological Vacancy of Digital Archaeology," Digital Archaeology Reconsidered I (2025).

DOI: [To be assigned]