Machine-Created Culture: Essays on the Archaeology of Digital Things and Places

Archaeology can be weird and fun, especially the digital kind. Readers of archaeology, media studies, and game studies are introduced to the wild-and-wooly side of digital archaeology: artifacts, sites, and landscapes contained within--and supporting--interactive digital built environments. Follow your guide, the reluctant digital archaeologist Charlie, to disappear into the weeds of post-landscapes, non-place cultural spaces, persistent digital spaces, software citizenship, machine-created culture, digital drift, technofossils, quantum archaeology, archaeological time, singularities, complexity and retrocausality, noise, and more. These bite-sized chapters offer new ways of interpreting humanity’s blossoming digitalia, an archaeology done at the source of creation, use, and abandonment of our electronic selves.

Andrew Reinhard is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University and is the Director of Publications for the American Numismatic Society. His first book, Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, was published by Berghahn Books in 2018.