The Archaeobyte Thesis

Digital Artifacts as Ontological Class

Digital Archaeology Reconsidered: Essay II of IV

Unearth Heritage Foundry

Abstract

Essay I diagnosed the ontological vacancy at the heart of digital archaeology, noting its lack of a coherent theory of what digital artifacts are. The present work supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on process philosophy, information theory, and the emerging discourse on digital materiality, the text articulates the archaeobytological thesis: digital artifacts constitute a distinct ontological class, irreducible to physical objects or analog media, requiring their own taxonomic framework and investigative methodology. The essay develops the concept of the "archaeobyte" as the fundamental unit of archaeobytological inquiry, distinguishes between forensic and formal materiality in digital objects, and presents a state-based taxonomy (Vivibyte, Umbrabyte, Petribyte, Necrobyte) that classifies digital artifacts according to their functional status within contemporary technical environments. The result is a theoretical apparatus adequate to the distinctively digital phenomena that digital archaeology investigates.

Introduction: From Vacancy to Foundation

The previous essay in this series, "The Field Without a Floor," argued that digital archaeology has been practiced for decades without a coherent theory of what digital artifacts are. Practitioners have developed sophisticated techniques for recovering, preserving, and analyzing digital objects, yet they have done so without articulating the ontological status of those objects; their mode of being, their conditions of persistence, their relationship to physical substrates, their distinctive decay mechanisms.

The present work provides the missing theory. The central claim holds that digital artifacts constitute a distinct ontological class, fundamentally different from physical artifacts and analog media, requiring conceptual frameworks and investigative methodologies developed specifically for their distinctive properties. The central tenet constitutes the archaeobyte thesis.

The definition does not concern what digital artifacts are made of (electrons or magnetic orientations alongside voltage states), nor what they represent (texts and images as well as sounds or programs). Rather, the argument concerns their mode of being, the way they exist and persist, the way they decay, and the way they relate to other entities. A ceramic pot and a JPEG image may both be "artifacts" in some generic sense, but the items exist in fundamentally different ways, and understanding those differences is the first task of any rigorous digital archaeology.

The essay proceeds in four movements. First, we situate the archaeobyte thesis within broader philosophical discussions of digital ontology, drawing particularly on process philosophy and recent work on digital materiality. Second, we develop the concept of the "archaeobyte" as the fundamental unit of archaeobytological inquiry. Third, we distinguish between two dimensions of digital materiality (forensic and formal) and show how the distinction illuminates the peculiar ontological status of digital objects. Fourth, we present a state-based taxonomy that classifies digital artifacts according to their functional relationship to contemporary technical environments: Vivibyte (living), Umbrabyte (liminal), Petribyte (petrified), and Necrobyte (lost).

Part I: Philosophical Foundations

Against Digital Dualism

The most persistent error in thinking about digital artifacts constitutes what may be termed digital dualism: the assumption that digital objects are immaterial, existing in some ethereal realm of "cyberspace" distinct from the physical world.¹ The binary logic pervades popular discourse (the internet as a "place" one "goes to") alongside scholarly treatments that emphasize the "virtual" nature of digital experience.

Digital dualism is empirically incorrect. Digital artifacts are thoroughly material. Artifacts exist as magnetic orientations on spinning platters or as voltage states in transistors, as patterns of charge in flash memory cells, and as electromagnetic waves propagating through fiber optic cables. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has demonstrated, digital inscription is "a form of displacement... a physical activity that is registered in the physical environment."² The hard drive's read/write head hovers nanometers above the platter surface, depositing and detecting magnetic fields with exquisite precision. Nothing immaterial exists about this process.

Yet the materiality of digital artifacts is genuinely strange. A physical artifact, such as a pot, a coin, or a manuscript, exists in one place at one time. Movement is possible, but simultaneous ubiquity is not. A digital artifact, by contrast, can exist in unlimited identical copies across unlimited physical substrates. The "same" JPEG file can exist on a hard drive in Tokyo, a server in Virginia, a phone in São Paulo, and in transit as radio waves between cell towers, all simultaneously. In what sense is it the "same" file? The question resists easy answer.

Luciano Floridi has distinguished between "digital ontology" (the claim that reality itself is fundamentally digital) and "informational ontology" (the claim that reality is fundamentally structural, with digital and analog being "modes of presentation").³ Archaeobytology is agnostic on these metaphysical questions about the ultimate nature of reality. The concern remains modest but immediate: what kind of entities are digital artifacts, and how should the discipline study them?

Process and Event

Process philosophy offers a more adequate framework than substance metaphysics for understanding digital artifacts. In the tradition stemming from Alfred North Whitehead, reality is not composed of static substances that undergo change but of processes and events that constitute the fundamental units of existence. "There does not exist things," as Whitehead put it, "but only things in the making."⁴

Processual ontology illuminates digital artifacts in several ways. First, digital artifacts are never static. Even a file "at rest" on a hard drive is maintained in existence by ongoing processes: the drive's motor spinning the platters, the controller managing the read/write operations, the operating system maintaining the file system, the power supply delivering electricity. Stop any of these processes, and the artifact becomes inaccessible. The file exists not as a substance but as a maintained pattern, a standing wave in a sea of computational process.

Second, the identity of a digital artifact is constituted by its relationships rather than by some intrinsic essence. A file is what it is by virtue of its format (the conventions that govern its interpretation), its filesystem location (the path by which it can be addressed), its dependencies (the software required to render it meaningful), and its history (the chain of copies and transformations that produced it). Remove these relational contexts, and the file becomes an unintelligible sequence of bits: not nothing, but not this file either.

Third, digital artifacts are always becoming. The same file, opened in different software on different operating systems at different times, may render differently or behave differently; the artifact may mean differently. A webpage from 1997, viewed in 2025, is not the "same" artifact it was. JavaScript may fail, embedded objects may be broken, and the context (the web of links it participated in) may be shattered. The artifact does not simply persist; it becomes differently across time.

Timothy Scott Barker, drawing on Whitehead and Deleuze, has argued that "digital media seem to be marked by process... the constant flux of code."⁵ The digital image "is an unstable stream of code, never attaining an eternal material existence without the constant flux of information." Instability represents no deficiency of digital artifacts compared to physical ones; instability constitutes their mode of being. Digital archaeology must take the processual ontology as foundational.

Two Materialisms

Recent scholarship has developed sophisticated accounts of digital materiality. The present analysis draws on Kirschenbaum's distinction between forensic materiality and formal materiality, regarded as fundamental to archaeobytological theory.⁶

Forensic materiality refers to the physical inscription of digital data on storage media. The concept concerns the actual magnetic orientations on a disk platter and the physical degradation of those orientations over time; the concept addresses the traces left by deleted files alongside the recoverable evidence that exists at the level of physical substrate. Forensic materiality grounds the practices of computer forensics, the "natural counterpart to textual criticism and physical bibliography" that Kirschenbaum advocates.⁷

At the forensic level, digital artifacts are individuated and unique. Each hard drive has a unique physical history. Even "identical" files, copied bit-for-bit, occupy different physical locations and have different forensic properties. Data remanence (the persistence of information even after deletion) is a forensic phenomenon: the magnetic traces remain even when the file system no longer indexes them. The forensic archaeologist treats digital media as physical evidence, applying techniques developed in criminal investigation to questions of provenance, authenticity, and history.

Formal materiality, by contrast, refers to the symbolic and logical structures that govern the interpretation of digital data. It concerns file formats, encoding standards, software architectures, interface conventions; the layers of abstraction that transform physical signals into meaningful artifacts. Formal materiality is what allows the "same" file to exist across multiple physical substrates; what unifies the copies is not their physical implementation but their conformity to shared formal specifications.

At the formal level, digital artifacts exhibit the strange properties that distinguish them from physical objects; perfect replicability and substrate independence alongside machine-dependent intelligibility. Two files are "the same" if they satisfy the same formal specification, regardless of their physical implementation. A JPEG is a JPEG because it conforms to the JPEG standard, not because of how it happens to be inscribed on any particular drive.

Archaeobytology must attend to both dimensions of digital materiality. The forensic dimension grounds the artifact in physical reality and enables questions about provenance alongside authenticity. The formal dimension constitutes the artifact's identity across instances and enables questions about intelligibility and preservation. The two dimensions are irreducible to each other, and a complete archaeobytological analysis must address both.

Part II: The Archaeobyte

Definition

The archaeobyte is the fundamental unit of archaeobytological inquiry.⁸ It names any digital artifact considered as an object of archaeological investigation. The artifact is considered in terms of its provenance, its history, its decay, its relationship to the technical and cultural contexts that produced it, and its significance for understanding the digital past.

The term combines archaeo- (ancient or original alongside primitive) with -byte (the fundamental unit of digital information). The archaeobyte is not "an old file." Rather, the term designates any digital artifact approached with archaeological attention; attention to its material constitution and its formal specification, to its contextual embedding and its temporal trajectory, and to its cultural meaning.

A 1997 homepage preserved on the Internet Archive is an archaeobyte. A floppy disk recovered from an author's estate qualifies. A proprietary file format whose specification has been lost also fits the definition. A screenshot of a disappeared social media post serves as an archaeobyte, as does the concept of the "Away Message," a ritual practice that existed only within the now-defunct AOL Instant Messenger platform. Each constitutes a proper object of archaeobytological inquiry, though they differ dramatically in their material status.

Tangible and Conceptual

Archaeobytology distinguishes between tangible archaeobytes and conceptual archaeobytes.⁹

Tangible archaeobytes are discrete digital files or data structures that can be preserved, copied, and analyzed as data objects. Examples include HTML files and image files alongside executable programs, database records, email messages, and archived webpages. Tangible archaeobytes are the "potsherds" of digital archaeology: the material artifacts whose form and substance can (in principle) be preserved with relative ease.

Conceptual archaeobytes are behaviors and rituals as well as platform-specific functions that existed only within their systems and cannot be preserved as standalone files. Examples include the AIM Away Message and the GeoCities Guestbook alongside the Webring navigation system, the "nudge" function on MSN Messenger, and the chronological feed (before algorithmic sorting). Conceptual archaeobytes cannot be archived as data; they require documentation, emulation, or narrative reconstruction. As Diana Taylor has distinguished, they exist not in the "archive" (material traces) but in the "repertoire" (embodied practices and social knowledge).¹⁰

Boundaries remain porous, however. A tangible archaeobyte (a preserved HTML guestbook page) may serve as evidence for a conceptual archaeobyte (the social practice of "guestbook signing"). Conversely, a conceptual archaeobyte may leave tangible traces (screenshots or log files alongside secondary documentation) that become objects of analysis in their own right. The distinction matters methodologically: tangible archaeobytes are subject to forensic analysis; conceptual archaeobytes require ethnographic and historical methods.

The Archaeobyte as Event

Following processual ontology, the analysis understands the archaeobyte not as a static object but as an event: a "concrescence," in Whitehead's term, of multiple processes into a momentary unity.¹¹

Consider a webpage. At any moment of viewing, the webpage is an event: the convergence of stored data (HTML or CSS or JavaScript files on a server) and network transmission (HTTP requests and responses) alongside client-side rendering (the browser interpreting the code) and user perception (the human registering the visual display). Change any of these processes, and the event changes. The "same" page, viewed in different browsers or at different times, becomes a different event.

Event-ontology has important implications for archaeological practice. When a webpage is preserved, what exactly is being preserved? The server-side files or a screenshot of one rendering? A recording of the network traffic or a WARC file capturing the HTTP exchange? Each preserves a different aspect of the event, and none captures the event. The archaeobyte as experienced is irreproducible; preserved traces enable partial reconstruction of the event.

Event-ontology also illuminates the "bitrot" problem. A file does not decay like a physical object, through gradual material degradation. Decay occurs because the event of its interpretation becomes impossible: the software that rendered it is no longer available, the format specification is no longer understood, or the dependencies it relies on are no longer functional. The bits may be preserved, yet the archaeobyte is lost. Failure resides not in the substrate but in the process of actualization.

Part III: States of Being

The Problem of Classification

Archaeology requires typology. Physical archaeologists classify artifacts by material (ceramic, lithic, metal), by form (vessel, tool, ornament), by function (storage, cutting, display), by cultural affiliation (Minoan, Mayan, Ming). These classifications enable comparison, periodization, and interpretation.

Digital archaeology has lacked a comparable typology. Files are classified by format (.jpg or .html or .exe), by size, by date, and by location in a file system; however, the technical classifications do not capture what matters archaeologically: the artifact's status as a recoverable object of knowledge, its relationship to the technical systems that give it meaning, or its position on the spectrum from living functionality to total loss.

Archaeobytology proposes a state-based taxonomy that classifies digital artifacts not by their format or content but by their functional relationship to contemporary technical environments. The taxonomy distinguishes four states: Vivibyte and Umbrabyte alongside Petribyte and Nullibyte. The classifications are not fixed categories but positions on a continuum of decay, and artifacts may transition between states as technical environments evolve.

The Vivibyte: Living DNA

A Vivibyte is a digital artifact that remains fully functional and accessible within contemporary systems.¹² The term combines Latin vivus (living) with -byte. The Vivibyte is the "living DNA" of the digital past, an artifact that has survived the extinctions of technological change and continues to function in the present.

Examples of Vivibytes include:

• MP3 audio files, which remain playable on contemporary devices
• JPEG and PNG images, which render correctly in modern browsers
• PDF documents, supported by a robust ecosystem of readers
• Plain text files encoded in UTF-8, the most universal of formats
• HTML pages using only basic markup, which render in current browsers

The Vivibyte owes its survival not to any intrinsic property but to ecosystem continuity: the persistence of software and standards alongside practices that maintain its interpretability. MP3 survived because the audio industry built infrastructure around it; JPEG survived because camera manufacturers adopted it. Survival is never guaranteed. A format may be Vivibyte today and Petribyte tomorrow, should the ecosystem shift.

The Vivibyte teaches the Archive that survival is possible but contingent. The Vivibyte provides the evidence base for understanding digital longevity: what properties correlate with survival? Open standards and wide adoption, format simplicity or corporate investment? The comparative study of Vivibytes and their extinct counterparts illuminates the dynamics of digital preservation.

For the Anvil, the Vivibyte is the proof of concept. The Vivibyte demonstrates that digital artifacts can persist across decades of technological change, if conditions are right. The lesson is not complacency but strategy: how can we engineer artifacts that will be Vivibytes rather than Petribytes fifty years hence?

The Umbrabyte: Liminal Artifact

An Umbrabyte is a digital artifact trapped "betwixt and between" states (preserved in form but compromised in function).¹³ The term combines Latin umbra (shadow) with -byte. The Umbrabyte is the "fly in amber," the ghost in the archive: technically alive, functionally dead.

Examples of Umbrabytes include:

• GeoCities homepages archived on the Wayback Machine: the HTML renders, but CGI scripts cannot execute; embedded MIDI files may not play and webring links point to nothing
• Flash contentpreserved but unplayable without specialized emulators
• Interactive websites whose server-side components have been lost, leaving only a static shell
• Database-driven applications whose data has been preserved but whose application logic is gone
• Emails whose attachments reference protocols or servers that no longer exist

The Umbrabyte occupies the liminal space that Victor Turner described in his anthropology of ritual: a threshold state that is neither one thing nor another.¹⁴ The file exists; the file does not function. The form is preserved; the meaning is lost.

From a semiotic perspective, the Umbrabyte is a case of catastrophic de-signification. Ferdinand de Saussure established that a sign is composed of a signifier (the form) and a signified (the concept).¹⁵ The Umbrabyte is a signifier cut loose from its signified: a word that has lost its meaning or a gesture whose context has vanished.

Umbrabytes represent the most important category for digital archaeology, because they are both the most common outcome of digital decay and the richest source of archaeological insight. The GeoCities homepage as Umbrabyte reveals what was lost: the guestbook that no longer accepts signatures, the webring that no longer navigates, or the "Homestead" that can no longer be edited. The disruptions are not technical failures; they represent evidence of broken social contracts and betrayed promises alongside the structural violence of platform enclosure.

Umbrabytes teach the Archive that preservation is never complete. Every archived artifact is an Umbrabyte to some degree, separated from the context that gave it full meaning and stripped of the dynamic processes that constituted its life. The question is not whether to accept this loss but how to document the loss: what was lost, when, and why? What does the loss reveal?

For the Anvil, the Umbrabyte is a warning. The GeoCities extinction event of 2009, when Yahoo shut down the platform and millions of homepages became Umbrabytes, stands as the paradigmatic case of platform betrayal. The "homestead" metaphor promised digital land ownership; the terms of service preserved the landlord's right to demolish the neighborhood. The Anvil learns: never build on rented land.

The Petribyte: Petrified Function

A Petribyte is a digital artifact whose native function is extinct.¹⁶ The term invokes "petrification" (the geological process by which organic matter is replaced by minerals, preserving form while eliminating life). The Petribyte is a fossil; preserved, utterly dead.

Examples of Petribytes include:

• RealPlayer .rm files, for which no contemporary player exists
• Flash .swf applications, rendered unplayable by browser deprecation
• Microsoft Works .wks files, unsupported by current productivity suites
• HyperCard stacks, tied to a discontinued platform
• AIM chat logs, orphaned by the service's shutdown

The Petribyte differs from the Umbrabyte in degree, not kind. The Umbrabyte retains partial function; the Petribyte has lost all function. A Flash file is an Umbrabyte if an emulator exists and a Petribyte if it does not; the classification depends on the availability of recovery tools.

Petribytes are archaeologically significant not for their inaccessibility but for what that inaccessibility reveals. The Petribyte is evidence of alternate technological futures, proof that the current technological landscape was not inevitable. RealPlayer was once dominant; Flash was once ubiquitous; HyperCard was once Apple's vision of end-user programming. Each Petribyte is a fossilized possibility, a branch of the evolutionary tree that terminated.

Petribytes also reveal the ideology embedded in format. A file format is never neutral; formats encode assumptions about use and ownership as well as control. Proprietary formats (like .wks or .rm) tied functionality to corporate ecosystems; when those ecosystems collapsed, so did the formats. Open formats (like .txt or .html) distributed functionality across multiple implementations and proved more resilient. The Petribyte is often a casualty of enclosure, of formats designed to lock users in, which locked them out when the lock-maker disappeared.

Petribytes teach the Archive that comprehensiveness is impossible and triage is necessary. Not every Petribyte can be resurrected through emulation; the resources do not exist. The Archive must decide what to invest in recovering, what to document in its non-functional state, or what to let remain fossil.

For the Anvil, the Petribyte is a blueprint vault. The Lost Blueprints of extinct platforms contain design decisions, interface conventions, and interaction patterns that may be worth reviving. The Anvil studies the Petribyte to understand what was lost and forges new systems that embody its lost virtues without repeating its fatal dependencies.

The Nullibyte: The Lost

A Nullibyte is a digital artifact that no longer exists in any recoverable form (known to have existed through secondary documentation but absent from any archive).¹⁷ The term combines Latin nullus (none/nothing) with -byte. The Nullibyte represents absolute absence: not trapped between states but genuinely gone.

Examples of Nullibytes include:

• Personal homepages that predated archiving initiatives and were never captured
• Private messages on defunct platforms whose servers were wiped
• Early versions of software whose binaries were overwritten and never preserved
• Ephemeral content (Snapchats or disappearing posts) designed for deletion
• Oral traditions of early internet culture whose practitioners have died or forgotten

Nullibytes pose fundamental epistemological challenges. How is what no longer exists studied? The methods are indirect: secondary documentation (screenshots or descriptions or memories) and negative evidence (the absence of certain files in archives that should contain them) alongside forensic traces (deleted files sometimes recoverable from drives) and oral history (interviewing those who remember).

Nullibytes also raise questions of selection. Archiving is never comprehensive; choices are made about what to preserve, and those choices are never neutral. The Nullibyte is often what was not chosen, the marginal, the ephemeral, the insufficiently interesting to institutional archivists. The absences in the archive are as telling as the presences.

Nullibytes teach the Archive that loss is inevitable and documentation is urgent. Every artifact not preserved today may be a Nullibyte tomorrow. The Archive cannot prevent all loss. The Archive must ensure that loss is documented, that knowledge of what has been lost and why remains available.

For the Anvil, the Nullibyte is a negative space to be filled. The Anvil cannot resurrect what is gone, but the Anvil can create monuments to the lost: artifacts that commemorate and interpret as well as respond to what has vanished. The Digital Monument is not the lost artifact but a new artifact that keeps the loss present.

Part IV: The Dual Materiality of Digital Objects

Forensic and Formal Revisited

With our taxonomic framework in place, we can now return to the distinction between forensic and formal materiality and develop its archaeobytological implications more fully.

Forensic materiality concerns the artifact as physical inscription. The archaeologist approaches the hard drive as a crime scene, applying techniques of trace evidence to recover what was written, overwritten, deleted, and degraded. The forensic gaze sees individual drives with individual histories: this drive that belonged to this person, that suffered this damage, that bears these magnetic traces of past states.

Formal materiality concerns the artifact as symbolic structure. The archaeologist approaches the file as a text, applying techniques of interpretation to understand what it means, how it was meant to function, what conventions govern its intelligibility. The formal gaze sees formats, standards, and specifications: this file that conforms to this standard, that requires this interpreter, that belongs to this family of related formats.

Forensic and formal materialisms are not opposed but complementary. A complete archaeobytological analysis addresses both; the physical history of this disk and the symbolic structure of this format. The two approaches enable different kinds of questions.

Forensic analysis enables questions of provenance: Where did this artifact come from? Who created the artifact? When? On what equipment? Through what chain of custody did the artifact arrive? Provenance questions matter for establishing authenticity and for understanding the artifact's historical context. The recovered drive from an author's estate is not just a container of files but an artifact in its own right, serving as evidence of working practices, revision histories, and personal computing environments.

Formal analysis enables questions of intelligibility: What does this artifact mean? How was the artifact intended to function? What interpretive conventions must be applied to render the artifact meaningful? Intelligibility questions matter for understanding the artifact's content and for assessing the success of preservation efforts. An archived webpage is not successfully preserved merely by capturing its bits; it is successfully preserved only if those bits can be rendered into a meaningful experience for future users.

The Double Archaeology

Archaeobytology is thus a double archaeology, attending to both dimensions simultaneously.

Consider a concrete example: a collection of floppy disks recovered from a game developer's archive, containing early versions of a classic video game. The forensic archaeology examines the disks themselves: their physical condition, the sectors that are readable and unreadable, the traces of deleted files that might be recoverable, the timestamps that reveal development chronology. The forensic archaeologist treats the disks as material artifacts with physical histories.

The formal archaeology examines the files the disks contain: the source code and its structure, the data formats used for graphics and sound, the executable binaries and their dependencies, the documentation and design notes. The formal archaeologist treats the files as symbolic structures requiring interpretation.

Neither analysis stands complete without the other. The forensic analysis without the formal reveals that these bits are on this disk but cannot reveal what they mean. The formal analysis without the forensic reveals what these files are but not where they came from or whether they can be trusted. The double archaeology synthesizes both into a complete account: these bits, on this disk, from this provenance, meaning this content, requiring this interpreter for interpretation.

Decay in Two Registers

The double materiality also illuminates the distinctive decay mechanisms of digital artifacts.

At the forensic level, digital artifacts suffer substrate decay: the physical degradation of storage media. Magnetic orientations weaken over time (magnetic "fade"); optical media develops "disc rot" as the reflective layer oxidizes; flash memory cells lose charge after limited write cycles. Substrate decay is analogous to the decay of physical artifacts; it follows the second law of thermodynamics, progresses monotonically, and can be slowed but not prevented.

At the formal level, digital artifacts suffer ecosystem decay: the obsolescence of the interpretive contexts that render them meaningful. The bits may be preserved, but if no software can interpret them, they are illegible. Ecosystem decay is not physical; it is social and technical: a function of changing standards, discontinued software, and evolving practices.

The two decay processes are independent. An artifact may be forensically sound but formally inaccessible (the bits are intact, but no interpreter exists). Or it may be forensically degraded but formally viable (some bits are lost, but enough remain for interpretation). The most endangered artifacts are those suffering both: physical damage to the substrate and obsolescence of the ecosystem.

Preservation strategies must address both decay processes. Forensic preservation (refreshing media, maintaining environmental conditions, creating bit-perfect images) addresses substrate decay. Formal preservation (format migration, emulation, documentation of specifications) addresses ecosystem decay. Neither alone is sufficient; both together are necessary.

Conclusion: The Foundation Laid

The present work has articulated the archaeobyte thesis: digital artifacts constitute a distinct ontological class, requiring conceptual frameworks and investigative methodologies developed specifically for their distinctive properties.

Key claims include:

1. Digital artifacts exist through process rather than as static substances. Their being is maintained by ongoing computational activity; their identity is constituted by their relationships rather than by intrinsic essences.
2. Digital artifacts possess a dual materiality: forensic (their physical inscription on storage media) and formal (their symbolic structure as interpreted by software). Archaeobytological analysis must attend to both dimensions.
3. Digital artifacts can be classified by their functional state: Vivibyte (living) and Umbrabyte (liminal) alongside Petribyte (petrified) and Nullibyte (lost). The taxonomy enables archaeological triage and illuminates the dynamics of digital decay.
4. Digital artifacts decay through two independent processes: substrate decay (physical degradation) alongside ecosystem decay (interpretive obsolescence). Preservation must address both.
5. The fundamental unit of archaeobytological inquiry is the archaeobyte: any digital artifact approached with archaeological attention to provenance and history, to decay and context, and to significance.

With this theoretical foundation in place, the inquiry can now turn to methodology. Essay III, "Decay, Persistence, and the Liminal Archive," will develop the practical implications of archaeobytological theory: what doing digital archaeology archaeobytologically means, what questions become askable, what methods become necessary, and what practices enable recovery and preservation. The foundation is laid; the edifice must be built.

Notes

Works Cited

Barker, Timothy Scott. "Toward a Process Philosophy for Digital Aesthetics." In Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). Belfast, 2009.

Floridi, Luciano. "Against Digital Ontology." Synthese 168, no. 1 (2009): 151–178.

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

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Wade Baskin. 1916. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. 1929. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Digital Archaeology Reconsidered is a four-part essay series by Unearth Heritage Foundry examining the theoretical foundations of digital archaeology. Essay III, "Decay, Persistence, and the Liminal Archive," will appear next in this series.

Citation: Unearth Heritage Foundry, "The Archaeobyte Thesis: Digital Artifacts as Ontological Class," Digital Archaeology Reconsidered II (2025).

DOI: [To be assigned]