Sara Polak – Web Zero: The Archaeology of Bitcoin | BTC Prague 2025 Keynote

What does a 50,000-year-old baboon bone have to do with Bitcoin? More than you’d think. On the BTC Prague stage, I argued that archaeology and Bitcoin share the same founding obsession: the human need to keep honest records without letting power corrupt them.

Make Archaeology Great Again

I know what you’re thinking. “Archaeology? I came for Bitcoin.” Fair. But hear me out. We live in a world of paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. If we want to survive that combination, we need to understand our past — and we need to understand it honestly.

The First Ledger

The Ishango bone is almost 50,000 years old. It’s a baboon fibula from Sub-Saharan Africa covered in tally marks. It’s one of the earliest examples of humans keeping track of something. We have always wanted to hold each other to account. The problem begins when a third party — a state, a church, an empire — takes control of the tally. That’s where Bitcoin becomes an archaeologist’s dream. It enables peer-to-peer record keeping at civilizational scale, without the middlemen who have caused every major collapse from the Roman third-century crisis to modern central banking.

Who Controls the Past

The victors write history — that’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s archaeology 101. The Nazis funded the Ahnenerbe specifically to dig up artifacts and reframe them as proof of Aryan timelessness. Mussolini spent money Italy didn’t have excavating Caligula’s ships to manufacture historical legitimacy. Central institutions need timelessness, and they buy it by controlling the historical record. That’s why immutable, decentralized data storage is not a nerdy technical detail — it’s a civilizational safeguard.

A Maya City and a Missing Stela

Two years ago I was part of an expedition to Guatemala that discovered Los Awellos — a Maya city 2,700 years old, likely one of the oldest ever found. We used LiDAR technology to see through 1,600 square kilometers of jungle canopy. Three percent of the laser signal reaches the ground. That three percent, combined with neural networks trained to spot square and rectangular structures, led us to a radial pyramid next to an astronomical observatory. In the Maya context, that means urban center. We went in with machetes, a 1984 Toyota, seventeen species of poisonous snake, and no hospital within five hours.

What we brought back were blurry photographs, hand-drawn sketches, and ceramic fragments including a pot with pseudoglyphs — the Maya had forgotten how to write their own script but still cosplayed the alphabet because writing mattered that much to them. And here’s the problem: small errors in those sketches accumulate. A wrong scale, a misplaced stone — it’s like mercury in fish. Individually harmless. Collectively, it poisons the whole story we tell about the past.

We also found a pre-classical stela in 2021. Photographs were taken, it was reburied for protection, and when we returned two years later it was gone. Shortly after, a museum at a prominent American university acquired a new object of “unknown provenance.” The provenance is very known. This is still happening in the 21st century.

Why Bitcoin Belongs in the Excavation Trench

Three concrete things Bitcoin could fix: immutable provenance records, so stolen artifacts can’t be laundered through “unknown origin” paperwork; distributed data storage that no state or private institution controls; and decentralized crowdfunding that frees researchers from grant systems where your funder is also the entity you’re supposed to challenge.

Academia is increasingly a grant-hunting machine. Your intellectual independence evaporates the moment your breadgiver is also your subject of inquiry. Replacing government money with Big Tech money doesn’t solve that — Google and