The Politics of Digital Stratigraphy: Power, Preservation, and the Question of Whose Heritage

Abstract The previous essays in this series have established the theoretical foundations and taxonomic categories as well as the methodological protocols of archaeobytology. This concluding essay turns to politics. Archives are not neutral repositories; such institutions are instruments of power that determine what is remembered and what is forgotten, whose voices are preserved and whose are silenced. The essay examines three political dimensions of digital archaeology: the structural violence of platform capitalism, which creates and destroys digital heritage according to corporate imperatives; the unequal distribution of preservation resources, which privileges certain communities while abandoning others to digital oblivion; and the politics of access, which determines who can investigate the digital past and for what purposes. Against these forces of enclosure and erasure, the essay articulates an ethics of digital sovereignty, a commitment to decentralized preservation and community control as well as resistance to the platform logics that threaten digital heritage. Archaeobytology, properly understood, is not solely a scholarly discipline but a political practice. Keywords: Digital Sovereignty, Platform Capitalism, Archival Justice, Platform Betrayal, Surveillance Capitalism, Data Colonialism, Counter-Archives, Digital Heritage, Access Politics, Steward's Mandate, GeoCities