the.com/artifact
proof that someone before you made a thing and refused to be forgotten
means An object made or shaped by human hands, especially one of historical or cultural interest unearthed from the past.
from From Latin arte factum, "made by skill" — arte, the ablative of ars ("art, craft"), plus factum, "a thing made," from facere, "to make or do." It entered English in the early 1800s, first as two words, then fused. Facere is the same busy root that gives us fact, factory, and manufacture — all of them, at heart, things done by hand.
- oldest known
- stone tools predate humans by 700,000 years
- science twist
- in data, an artifact is an error mistaken for signal
- latin root
- from arte factum, made by skill
- looting math
- illicit antiquities trade rivals drugs in value
- space junk
- Voyager carries golden records as deliberate future artifacts
rosetta stone — egyptian basalt slab from 196 bc that cracked the code to reading hieroglyphics
antikythera mechanism — ancient greek bronze device from ~100 bc, the world's oldest known computer for predicting astronomical positions
lucy skeleton — 3.2 million year old hominin remains found in ethiopia in 1974, revolutionized understanding of human evolution
dead sea scrolls — ancient jewish texts discovered 1947 in west bank caves, oldest known biblical manuscripts by over a thousand years