If media archaeology has been a catchword in the fields of film studies and media studies for almost three decades now, then the amount of attention and degree of acceptance accorded to it has increased exponentially over the past ten years. The essays presented in Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracing Digital Cinema cover general reflections and specific case studies written over a period of some twenty-five years, often tackling similar questions, exploring them from different perspectives, but always keeping at the center of media archaeology cinema as an extraordinary mutable phenomenon, impossible to fix and yet firmly established in our culture and its imaginary for at least one hundred years. What I want to conclude with is a recapitulation of some of the main arguments by way of an epilogue, which turns out to be also something of a retrospect, in the sense that media archaeology's own status—as method, as practice, as a potential discipline—may have to come under scrutiny.

During those twenty-five years, a number of books have been published carrying Media Archaeology in its title, notably Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka's edited volume Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications and Jussi Parikka's What is Media Archaeology. Several books by Siegfried Zielinski (Audiovisions, Deep Time of the Media) can also be considered to directly contribute to the question “what is media archaeology”, and so does a collection of essays by Wolfgang Ernst entitled Digital Memory and the Archive. In recent years, the number of articles, book reviews, and special issues on media archaeology have augmented the scope and intensified the debate.

Casting one's net a little wider, one should add that some of the most intensely read and extensively reviewed books in recent years, such as Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer, Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time, and Jay David Bolter/Richard Grusin's Remediation as well as Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media all breathe the spirit of media archaeology even if they do not carry the words in the title or indeed use them in the text.