Cyborg archaeology designates a decisive methodological shift in which archaeological practice is no longer conceived as the neutral observation of a stable past, but as the production of knowledge through hybrid assemblages of bodies, devices, interfaces, algorithms and material remains. Developed most rigorously by Colleen Morgan, this framework draws upon Donna Haraway’s cyborg to reject the fantasy that digital tools merely extend traditional archaeological method. Instead, the archaeologist, the avatar, the motion-capture rig, the photogrammetric model and the computational environment become co-constitutive agents in the interpretation of history. Its significance lies not simply in the adoption of new technologies, but in the epistemic recognition that archaeological evidence is always mediated through embodied, technical and political conditions. This becomes particularly evident in practices such as glitchy avatar reconstruction, immersive site simulations, multisensorial modelling and performative re-enactment, where the seams of mediation are made visible rather than concealed beneath false realism. A particularly illuminating case is the use of monstrous or deliberately unstable digital bodies generated from bioarchaeological data, which refuse the authority of seamless reconstruction and instead foreground partiality, situatedness and interpretive tension. In this respect, cyborg archaeology closely parallels Anto Lloveras’s Cyborg Text: both diagnose contemporary knowledge production as inseparable from infrastructural systems, extractive hardware, hidden labour and coded environments. Their shared achievement is to transform hybridity from metaphor into method. Consequently, cyborg archaeology offers not merely a technical innovation, but a rigorous posthuman critique of heritage itself, one that renders the production of the past legible as an embodied, contested and infrastructurally conditioned act.

Cyborg methods in media archaeology treat the study and practice of media as inherently hybrid human-machine assemblages, where the researcher, the technical apparatus, the historical artifact, and the interpretive process co-produce knowledge without clear boundaries between organic and machinic agency. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s cyborg as a figure of partial connections, feminist posthumanism, and materialist critiques, these methods reject both technological determinism (media as autonomous agents) and humanistic anthropocentrism (media as mere tools or extensions of human intention). Instead, they foreground the entangled, often monstrous or glitch-ridden nature of media knowledge production, making visible the seams, ruptures, and infrastructural dependencies that conventional histories or representations obscure. This approach resonates strongly with Anto Lloveras’s Cyborg Text (1410), where textuality emerges as a composite of semiosis, code execution, logistical protocols, extractive labor, and planetary materiality—shifting from earlier regimes (material trace through invisible grammar) into a hybrid condition that demands new protocols of tracing, disclosure, recomposition, and intervention.