Narrative Provenance
Introduced in The Archaeobytology Textbook (Chapter 3), the concept of the "Archive and the Anvil" was developed to resolve the tension between digital preservationists (who look backward to save the past) and decentralized builders (who look forward to engineer the future).
The discipline argues that neither practice is sufficient alone: Archives without Anvils become graveyards of failure; Anvils without Archives are doomed to repeat historical mistakes.
Field Notes
The Librarian's Task: "These artifacts will not be forgotten. I will preserve them." (The impulse to rescue murdered platforms).
The Blacksmith's Task: "This will not happen again. I will forge alternatives." (The impulse to build sovereign infrastructure).
Praxis
In practice, the "Archive and Anvil" cycle functions as a feedback loop:
- Step 1 (Archive): Study the specific failure modes of a dead platform (e.g., how Twitter's centralization allowed for capture).
- Step 2 (Anvil): Engineer a protocol that is immune to that specific failure mode (e.g., ActivityPub's federation).
- Step 3 (Archive): Document the new system to ensure its own history is preserved.