The Field Without a Floor: On the Ontological Vacancy of Digital Archaeology

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. Keywords: Digital Archaeology, Archaeobytology, Ontological Vacancy, Digital Artifacts, Computational Archaeology, Forensic Recovery, Media Archaeology, Digital Ontology, Theoretical Foundations, Disciplinary Fragmentation