Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" expounds on the idea quite a bit. Imagine in the far future where pretty much all software you'd ever care to write has already been written, and the real challenge is in finding it again when you need it.
you don't need scifi books for that. Read up on the Java-class mentality in the 90's with people writing generic classes, and "puzzle architects" combining classes from a marketplace.
Was that really a thing? I ask because it feels like what I see people doing today around cloud and related technologies (kuber-this, kafka-that, etcd.), choosing solutions even before defining their problem.
I use the term software archaeology pretty regularly. I never researched where I first heard it but I’m assuming it isn’t my invention. Lots of looking at legacy code requires a degree of “knowing how the business used to work” or “how computers used to work”.
I'm not entirely certain but I believe this trend represents a small but growing niche application of this word introduced by Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge.
Another, much less respectable off-label application of a term, but which is surprisingly useful nonetheless, is the generalized way the word "technology" is used in Scientology jargon and its offshoots, where it is not particularly associated with electronic or apparatus or mechanisms in a physical sense but, instead refers to any sort of construct that was devised as, and/or serves as a force and agency multiplier. In this usage, writing systems are principally regarded as a technology, as are mass marketing and propaganda, and a bunch of other things. I highly doubt scientologists/EST people were the first to use it this way, but don't know where they picked it up from.
I like the tangents, but I believe archeology is just used definitionally - when the context is lost, sifting through source code may as well be digging up ancient artifacts.
