Artifact taphonomy is the study of how an object changes from the moment it is used, to when it is buried, altered, damaged, recovered, and interpreted. In archaeology, this helps distinguish original function from later decay or disturbance. In cyber security, the same idea applies to digital evidence: logs, files, memory artifacts, and metadata can be modified by time, system activity, attackers, or the collection process itself.
This matters because investigators must know which traces are reliable and which have been degraded, overwritten, compressed, or deliberately planted. Attackers may delete logs, alter timestamps, or drop misleading files to confuse analysis. Defenders use taphonomic thinking to understand evidence preservation, prioritize volatile data, and avoid overreading a fragmentary record. Careful artifact taphonomy helps incident responders reconstruct what really happened from partial, imperfect traces.