artifact

1. (archaeology) An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.Examples: "The dig produced many Roman artifacts."; "Holy shit! It is fascinating when a country’s culture seeps even into their math lessons, although it’s not really surprising. As a British child, our math questions were “if Johnny has two artifacts and Dinesh has two artifacts, then how many artifacts is Johnny about to have?” The answer, of course, “all the artifacts, Dinesh’s family can come visit them in a British museum whenever they’re in town.”"US

2. (biology) An appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.US

3. (computing, radiology) A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm or of physical interference in an acquisition process.Examples: "This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine."; "The opacity in his chest radiograph turned out to be an artifact due to the film."; "These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world."US

4. (software engineering) Ellipsis of build artifact.USabbreviationalt-ofellipsis

5. (museology) Any object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.US