artifact
Pluralartifacts
UK spellingartefact
- 1An object of archaeological or historical interest, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon, especially one found during an excavation.
The excavation turned up hundreds of Bronze Age artifacts, including pins, beads, and broken pottery.
Each artifact recovered from the shipwreck was photographed and tagged before it left the site.
UsageA period or people's name can come before the noun: Roman artifacts, Bronze Age artifacts. British English usually spells it artefact.
Similarrelic
Note
On a dig the word has a precise edge: it covers portable things people made or altered, such as a flint blade, a bead or a potsherd. A hearth or a posthole, which cannot be lifted out whole, is a feature instead, and seeds or animal bones are often called ecofacts.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Archaeological artifacts are portable objects made or modified by people. ppcteotihuacan.org
- Hearths and postholes are features, distinguished from portable artifacts by their attachment to their archaeological location. en.wikipedia.org
- Seeds and animal bones can be classified as ecofacts. en.wikipedia.org
- 2Any object held in a museum's collection; in the strict use only human-made objects, in a broader use natural ones as well.
The museum catalogs every artifact in its collection, from quilts to meteorites, with a number and a photograph.
Curators moved several fragile artifacts into climate-controlled storage before the renovation.
- 3Any object made or shaped by people, or more broadly by any intelligent agent, rather than occurring naturally.
The students compared natural objects such as shells and pinecones with artifacts such as buttons and cups.
A plastic bottle on the beach is an artifact, while the driftwood beside it is not.
Note
In this sense the word simply sorts the made from the natural, a cup from a shell, whatever the object's age or worth; a plastic spoon from last week counts as much as a Roman coin.
- 4A visible or audible distortion in an image, audio, or video file caused by lossy compression, another inexact processing algorithm, or physical interference while the data was captured.
Saving the photo at the lowest quality left blocky artifacts across the clear blue sky.
Turn the volume up and you can hear a faint digital artifact behind the singer's voice.
Similardistortion
Note
The flaw is usually named by its cause: compression artifacts in a heavily squeezed JPEG show as blocky squares or halos along sharp edges, while a metal filling can streak a scan. Ted Chiang stretched the term in his 2023 New Yorker essay "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web", calling a chatbot's hallucinations compression artifacts, plausible enough that only the originals expose them.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- JPEG compression can produce visible blocks. clem.dii.unisi.it
- JPEG compression can produce ringing artifacts resembling halos along sharp edges. clem.dii.unisi.it
- A metal dental filling can cause streaking artifacts in a scan. arxiv.org
- Ted Chiang's essay "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web" appeared in The New Yorker in 2023 and described chatbot hallucinations as compression artifacts whose plausibility requires comparison with originals to identify them. newyorker.com
- 5Something regarded as the product of human action or ideas rather than as an inherent part of the thing in question.
The five-day workweek is an artifact of labor laws and union bargaining, not a law of nature.
Many of the straight borders on the map are artifacts of treaties drawn up far away rather than natural divisions.
UsageUsually an artifact of something, to show people made it: an artifact of old treaties.
Similarproduct
Note
It is close kin to the experimental sense, where what the method made is mistaken for what was there. Calling a custom or pattern an artifact says it could have turned out otherwise.
- 6A result, feature, or structure seen in an experiment or specimen that is not really there but is caused by the method, equipment, or preparation.
The sudden jump in the temperature readings was an artifact of a loose sensor, not a real change in the reaction.
Some of the survey's most striking results turned out to be artifacts of the way the questions were worded.
UsageUsually an artifact of the method or tool: an artifact of a loose sensor.
Note
Microscopy has its own version in flaws made by staining a slide, and digital imaging has the compression artifact. Calling a result an artifact is a serious charge in science: it says the finding belongs to the method, not to nature.
- 7Short for build artifact: a file produced when a program's code is built, such as a package ready to install.
The pipeline uploads each artifact to the package registry once the tests pass.
If the build fails, no artifact is produced and the release is put on hold.
Note
Software teams clip build artifact to its second word as soon as the context is clear, so a pipeline simply uploads, stores and publishes artifacts. The word covers whatever a build produces for deployment, such as a compiled program, a package or an installer, as opposed to the source code it was built from.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 3 facts
- Pipelines can upload and store artifacts. docs.github.com
- Pipelines can publish build artifacts. learn.microsoft.com
- Build outputs can include programs, packages and installers. jetbrains.com
Practice
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Origin
Artifact is an altered spelling of artefact, which English took from Italian artefatto. The Italian word combines two Latin parts, arte ("by skill"), a form of ars ("art"), and factum ("thing made"), which comes from facio ("to make, do").