Digital archaeology

What is digital archaeology?

Digital archaeology is the work people do when they become the API. Computers are connected and supposedly interoperable, yet they don't understand what the data means. So a person stitches the meaning back together, and reconstructs the past by hand.

Why the gaps exist

When data travels from one system to another, it leaves behind who created it, what created it, why, when, where, and with what model. It also loses what the words meant. The same term can mean different things in different teams of the same company, and no system knows the difference. People fill that gap, one question at a time, and the work is thrown away afterward. This is structural amnesia at work.

The way out

Evidence infrastructure keeps that meaning attached to the data as it moves, so people don't have to dig for answers and AI doesn't have to guess.