I am not an archaeologist. I am a computer scientist; what I lack in knowledge of pottery sherds and lithics, I make up for in knowledge of digital ‘things’. And there is a storm coming. Currently, the Internet Archive, a major aggregator of digital content, contains 60 million items—effectively, digital ‘artefacts’. Only a year ago it held 45 million, and next year it will have millions more. Some of these artefacts will be items from other forms of media, newly digitised, and some will have been born digital. Yet, despite these staggering numbers, the Internet Archive receives just a small fraction of what actually exists in digital form, and the situation becomes even more striking when the reams of social media content (which are not the focus of the current article) are taken into consideration (Richardson Reference Richardson2019).

Why does this matter? Traditionally, archaeology has sought to understand humans through their material culture: things that people created, or affected, and things that, in turn, affected them. Through that lens, a digital artefact is an artefact. A digital artefact is the product of human ingenuity and creativity, one that affects the course of human lives. Much of modern culture is expressed in digital form, and this trend is increasing. To remain relevant in the modern world, archaeology must make sense of contemporary artefacts in a meaningful, knowledgeable way. Without exploring digital artefacts, we are effectively and wilfully experiencing amnesia.

As an ‘outsider’ versed in digital technology, I am naturally biased, but this external, independent vantage point also allows me to observe and critique archaeological efforts to study the digital. Digital archaeology and computational archaeology are a good place to begin: their names sound promising, but they are areas staunchly committed to the notion of using computers and computation to understand the old rather than to examine the new. To exemplify the problem, we need look no further than the international organisation, Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, one of whose stated goals is “to encourage communication and collaboration” between archaeologists and computer scientists, for example (n.d. item 2). Yet the CAA's Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology considers only “a wide variety of topics in digital applications to archaeology” (n.d. para. 2, emphasis added): computers in servitude. While the use of the computer as a tool to advance traditional archaeology is laudable, this narrow definition of digital applications inhibits their value for comprehending the contemporary. Even a discussion of ‘grand challenges’ for digital archaeology (Huggett et al. Reference Huggett, Reilly and Lock2018) fails to consider that the relationship between archaeology and the digital can be much more than an inwardly focused affair.

One might object that the study of digital artefacts aligns with so-called ‘media archaeology’ rather than archaeology proper. This is incorrect for two reasons. First, media archaeology has declared, in no uncertain terms, that it is not archaeology (Huhtamo & Parikka Reference Huhtamo, Parikka, Huhtamo and Parikka2011: 3). Second, the stated scope of media archaeology explicitly omits the possibility of an overlap with science and engineering (Huhtamo & Parikka Reference Huhtamo, Parikka, Huhtamo and Parikka2011: 3)—the very fields necessary to help make sense of digital artefacts; certainly, media archaeology's lack of a clear methodology has received harsh criticism (Elsaesser Reference Elsaesser2016). As much as archaeology might wish to abdicate digital artefacts to media archaeology, this critical aspect of contemporary culture cannot and should not be outsourced. Indeed, Finn (Reference Finn, Finn, Graves-Brown, Harrison and Piccini2013: 657) argues for the archaeological importance of being able to see “technological evolution over years and decades, rather than centuries or millennia”.

If there is no agreed home for the study of digital artefacts within archaeology, we can instead examine specific pieces of research that seek to understand these artefacts. Moshenska (Reference Moshenska2014), for example, recounts the discovery of a buried USB flash drive during a school-outreach excavation. Approaching it initially as a physical artefact, he applied conservation techniques, then addressed its digital content by plugging the still functional drive into a computer. This revealed predominantly music and video files, along with a smattering of schoolwork. While a deeper dive into the flash drive's digital strata would have been possible with the appropriate equipment and software, the point of the exercise is well made: digital artefacts can be viewed in an archaeological manner.

Perry and Morgan (Reference Perry and Morgan2015: 96) continue in this vein, noting the absence of “a robust research process and an adapted methodological toolkit” for handling digital media. One of their key contributions was an attempt to record formally the ‘strata’ they encountered—both physical and digital—when examining a hard drive and its contents, although they stopped short of computer-code ‘excavation’, rightly believing it to be a necessary but non-trivial undertaking. A vital but understated point in their work is the transition made in their investigation from non-destructive to destructive processes (Perry & Morgan Reference Perry and Morgan2015: 97); the digital work took place prior to that transition. A digital artefact can be excavated in a non-destructive way, far removed from Barker's (Reference Barker1993: 13) characterisation of excavation as “an unrepeatable experiment”. This opens the door to an archaeology that is reproducible and verifiable by others: cornerstones of the scientific endeavour.

Even archaeology itself can leave digital artefacts to study. Reilly et al. (Reference Reilly, Todd and Walter2016), for example, tell the fascinating story about early archaeological computer modelling work in the mid 1980s to visualise the Old Minster in Winchester, UK. Presumed lost, the model's files were rediscovered by chance some 30 years later and converted into a modern format. This not only afforded the opportunity to render them in new ways (e.g. 3D printing), but also to reflect on the original project in view of newer developments in cultural heritage, such as the London Charter that outlines best practices for computer visualisation (Denard Reference Denard, Bentkowska-Kafel, Denard and Baker2016). While this particular story had a happy ending, it does emphasise the reality that digital artefacts do not necessarily persist forever, and that they may be far from ‘future proof’ when content is locked into proprietary or now obsolete formats.

As an outsider to the field, a striking facet of the type of archaeological work that studies digital artefacts is its paucity in comparison to the volume of digital material that we are generating. Why is there such an aversion to digital artefacts within archaeology when we are awash with them, and when they are so central to our contemporary lives? Will archaeologists in 100 or 200 years lament that the field of today not only failed to engage with these ephemeral artefacts, but that no groundwork was laid to train new generations of archaeologists in how to deal with them?

There is, however, a relatively new area of study within archaeology that has been actively working to fill this vacuum: archaeogaming. Reinhard (Reference Reinhard2018a: 2) defines this as “the archaeology both in and of digital games”, observing that its earliest threads stretch back to 2002 (Watrall Reference Watrall2002). Most recently, Graham (Reference Graham2020) has contextualised archaeogaming by drawing a connection to agent-based modelling: for Graham, the archaeogaming he practises allows archaeologists/players to be participants in a simulation model. This is one of many understandings of archaeogaming. While it may seem counterproductive to restrict the scope of digital artefact study to games, or frivolous to study digital games at all, there is a compelling case to be made. The video game industry is enormous—a multi-billion-dollar global affair (e.g. Entertainment Software Association 2019; Entertainment Software Association of Canada 2019; TIGA n.d.) rivalling or surpassing, by some estimates, the traditional entertainment industry. Thus, the gaming industry is heavily influential on society and culture. Admittedly, financial statements may not be the best metric, but it is much harder to argue with the sheer numbers who play these games, constituting a convincing proportion of the global population (Entertainment Software Association 2019; Bankhurst Reference Bankhurst2020; TIGA n.d.).

It should come as no surprise that humans play games; indeed, evidence for play stretches back to Neolithic times (Rollefson Reference Rollefson1992). It therefore makes sense for archaeology to study modern as well as ancient games. Furthermore, a focus on gaming maximises the overlap with allied non-archaeological fields of research, including game studies, platform studies, game history and computing history. As practised, archaeogaming is notably inclusive in terms of the topics that fall under its umbrella. Most familiar might be examples whereby the games themselves are treated as physical artefacts to be recovered by excavation: a longstanding urban legend, for instance, was that Atari had buried game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill site in the early 1980s—a story verified by excavation in 2014 (Reinhard Reference Reinhard2015).

From physical to virtual, as locations of human activity, we can treat game worlds as virtual sites and adapt archaeological techniques to study them. The 2016 game No man's sky offered its players an enormous, effectively infinite, procedurally generated universe to explore. In response, the No man's sky Archaeological Survey was formed to document machine-created culture (Reinhard Reference Reinhard2018a), followed thereafter by the Legacy Hub Archaeological Project, which aimed to record human in-game material cultural remains following a cataclysmic event in the game universe (Reinhard Reference Reinhard2019). Such in-game work, whether single- or multiplayer, additionally necessitates considerations of how it can be conducted ethically (Dennis Reference Dennis2016; Flick et al. Reference Flick, Dennis and Reinhard2017)—considerations that extend to digital archaeology in general (Dennis Reference Dennis2020).

The content of games can also be studied in archaeogaming. We see, for example, surveys of how archaeology and archaeologists are represented in video games, highlighting inaccurate portrayals as well as the need to address them, because “to deny the power of [Lara] Croft and [Indiana] Jones in encouraging young archaeologists would be futile” (Meyers Emery & Reinhard Reference Meyers Emery and Reinhard2015: 144). By contrast, Copplestone (Reference Copplestone, Mol, Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Boom and Politopoulos2017) advocates taking control of the video game narrative in order to create games that communicate, and help reflect critically on, the archaeological process.

While these brief examples illustrate the breadth of archaeogaming work, they do not explore the implementation of the games, that is, the technology that brought these digital artefacts to fruition. Fortunately, archaeogaming is not lacking in this regard. Extending Perry and Morgan's (Reference Perry and Morgan2015) work, Reinhard (Reference Reinhard2018b) has experimented with expressing software versions of No man's sky in a Harris matrix. He later undertook an extensive archaeological study of the source code for the early text adventure game Colossal cave (Reinhard Reference Reinhard2019). In collaborations with archaeologists and other colleagues, I myself have conducted archaeogaming research into the implementation of copy protection and full-motion video, along with in-depth examinations of single games and entire game corpora (Aycock & Reinhard Reference Aycock and Reinhard2017; Aycock & Biittner Reference Aycock and Biittner2019, Reference Aycock and Biittner2020; Aycock & Copplestone Reference Aycock and Copplestone2019; Aycock et al. Reference Aycock, Reinhard and Therrien2019). Digital artefacts can be individually examined and, with the right tools, can be studied en masse.

It is instructive to examine the reasons why we have yet to see more technical work with digital artefacts, either in archaeogaming or in archaeology more generally. The above phrase, ‘collaborations with archaeologists’, is key here. Both archaeology and computer science are full-time pursuits, and it is only by combining forces in an interdisciplinary effort that these digital artefacts can be thoroughly examined. This echoes one of Moshenska's conclusions following his flash-drive study (Reference Moshenska2014), and represents a natural extension of how archaeologists increasingly work with specialists in other subject areas, except here looking to apply archaeology to computer science, not the other way around. There are, however, systemic issues outside of archaeology that affect collaborative opportunities. Computer science, for example, glorifies the new and novel with relatively little consideration of the past. Or, as historian Thomas Haigh (Reference Haigh2014: 43) puts it, “the technical history of computer science is greatly understudied”.

It is heartening, though, that computer scientists and archaeologists follow some similar methodologies. Moshenska (Reference Moshenska2016) has explored how the reverse engineering of technological artefacts and contemporary archaeology are intertwined, and, in lieu of a game's source code—which is often inaccessible—reverse engineering the binary code of the game is exactly the path a computer scientist would take. This is a specialised skill in computer science, albeit an important one, because it is used extensively in the computer security industry to analyse malicious software, such as computer viruses and worms. The process of reverse engineering a video game can even be considered to parallel Carver's ‘field research procedure’ (Carver Reference Carver2009): reconnoitring to select a site (a game); preliminarily evaluating the game using extant software tools; planning strategy and defining research questions; and excavating via reverse engineering to address those questions. In many ways, we are not so far apart.

In the time it has taken to read this article, the Internet Archive has added an average of several hundred new digital items to its trove. What a wonder it would be to discover that many physical artefacts in the same amount of time during an excavation! Digital artefacts pose enormous challenges, but also enormous opportunities. Archaeology should be at its forefront.